David Miliband: From my experience of the former Prime Minister, he is more than capable of looking after himself. The reaction of leaders from across the region has been significant and positive. The mandate of the former Prime Minister is important and he will be able to develop it under his own steam. In the telephone calls that I have had over the last four days with regional leaders, they have welcomed his appointment and are looking forward to his active engagement in the arena as someone who has real knowledge of the issues that confront anyone who seeks peace for that part of the world.

David Miliband: My right hon. Friend speaks with a long history of engagement and expertise in this area. This November will mark 40 years since the passage of resolution 242, which marked the start of the UN engagement, which led, in 2002, to the commitment in Security Council resolution 1379, I think it was, to a two-state solution. As I said, the bedrock of our approach will be first to pursue that two-state solution, secondly, actively to support peacemakers in the region and those committed to peaceful political progress, and thirdly, to ensure that we have what the new Prime Minister has called an economic road map, as well as a political road map, for the future—and that it includes the humanitarian issues that I referred to earlier.

David Miliband: As I said earlier, we did engage with the new Government—the national unity Government that was created in the occupied Palestinian territories over the last year. I think that it is also important to point out that we were part of the EU, which sent about €680 million to that Government over the last year. I think that it is right to say that one issue that unites people across the House is the determination to pursue a two-state solution, and that can only be pursued with people who are willing to recognise that the other state has a right to exist. I know that my hon. Friend is committed to a two-state solution, and I hope that she and the rest of the House can follow through on that commitment, given the difficult waters that we have to navigate.

David Heathcoat-Amory: As the EU accounts have been rejected by the auditors now for the past 12 years, and as our net contribution to the EU budget this year will be nearly £5 billion, why did the European summit not tackle at all, judging by the published conclusions, the urgent issue of financial reform?

William Hague: Could the reason why the former French President said that be that it is true? Is it not clear that
	"the new EU treaty preserves the substance of the constitutional treaty"?
	Those are not my words, but those of the German Foreign Minister. Did the Prime Minister not say that Ministers had to honour their manifesto and that this is an issue of trust between him and the public? Would it not be a splendid start to the Foreign Secretary's time in office if he were to tell the Prime Minister that if there is no referendum on the revived EU constitution, he will never be able to use the words "honour" and "trust" with any credibility again?

David Miliband: My right hon. Friend speaks with the authority of a former Minister for Europe who has been through the European labyrinth, which my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson) has described. He is right, because in the end the European Union must prove its worth by delivering for the people who elect us to this House and to other Parliaments around Europe. It adds value when it focuses on the things that need to be done at a European level. Those things should be done efficiently, which is what this Government are determined to advocate.

Graham Brady: I congratulate the Minister on his appointment, although I think it regrettable, given the important negotiations that lie ahead, that the new Prime Minister has downgraded his post by not allowing him to attend Cabinet, which his two predecessors did. May I draw his attention to the comments of the legal adviser to the European Scrutiny Committee, Mr. Michael Carpenter, who said that the declaration on foreign affairs may turn out to be completely meaningless and who went on to cast doubt on all the other opt-outs on the so-called red lines? Given that the whole case made by the then Prime Minister as to why we were not going to have a referendum was due to those opt-outs on his so-called red lines, has that not been shown to be completely and utterly worthless?

Jim Murphy: Not at all. However, I begin by thanking the hon. Gentleman for his kind words of welcome to this important job. I also thank him for championing my cause—my mother will be pleased. The hon. Gentleman's specific points are, of course, unfounded, as were the points made by the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague). The treaty explicitly confirms for the first time that national security is the sole responsibility of member states. Where we agree, and where we agree unanimously, we will work together, but where we disagree, we will, of course, continue to act independently.

John Redwood: It is quite clear that declarations, protocols, emergency brakes and opt-ins have been tried in the past and have failed—they cannot be relied on. The only thing that works is a veto. Why does the Minister not say that this is going to be a new Government and use the IGC to put the vetoes back—the only sure way of defending the red lines?

Jim Murphy: The right hon. Gentleman has a long record of being wrong on European issues. He voted against the previous referendum proposals. When we look at the difference between the reform treaty and the constitutional treaty, we see that out has come automatic QMV for policing and judicial co-operation in criminal matters, out has come any suggestion of a binding charter of fundamental rights, out has come the weak emergency brake on social security measures, and out has come possible communal decision making for foreign and defence policy. Much has changed, but the right hon. Gentleman's decades-long, strident opposition to the UK's membership of the European Union still remains.

David Miliband: I said earlier that the bedrock of our approach would be to support first, a two-state solution; secondly, all those committed to peaceful negotiation in search of a solution; and, thirdly, the economic, social and humanitarian work that is essential. Consistency with the Quartet principles is the foundation. Obviously, we deplore the sort of sentiments that my hon. Friend read from the Hamas charter, because they are incompatible with the settled two-state solution that is the foundation of a peaceful middle east.

Nicholas Soames: Will the right hon. Gentleman use his best endeavours to urge our American friends to cease poisoning the well of relations between Fatah and Hamas? Does he agree that Palestinian unity is extremely important if security is to return to the territories, and that most important of all peace talks can recommence with Israel?

David Miliband: Palestinian unity is important, but the violence, the killing, the feuding between Hamas and Fatah representatives and supporters has deep roots. I cannot agree with the hon. Gentleman when he says that it is all the fault of the Americans— [Interruption.]—or words to that effect. "Poisoning the well" was the expression that he used, but one has to be very careful in making those sort of allegations. The unity to which he referred and the need for a set of Palestinian institutions that can provide the political basis for proper negotiations are obviously essential. I will certainly discuss those and other issues with Condoleezza Rice, my opposite number, when I visit the United States in due course.

Ann Clwyd: Does my right hon. Friend agree that it might help the peace process if the 44 properly elected Palestinian Members of Parliament who have been in Israeli jails for a considerable period of time were charged and brought to trial, and that the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which has been trying to visit them in jail for almost two years, should be given that access?

David Miliband: Yes, they should either be charged or released, which I think lay behind my right hon. Friend's question.

David Miliband: Perhaps unfortunately for the hon. Gentleman, I gave a very clear answer to my right hon. Friend. The Quartet principles made it clear that recent events made it doubly imperative that there was progress and re-engagement in the area. This issue and its resolution provide classic ground for the sort of progress that is needed.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown: May I add my congratulations to you on your birthday, Mr. Speaker? May I also congratulate the Minister on his new appointment? No doubt the Opposition will work closely with him.
	Will the Minister confirm that the Ahtisaari plan for the future of an independent Kosovo is the only fair and sustainable option on the table at the moment? Will he also confirm that his Government have been having discussions with the Russians, to persuade them that neither they nor their Serb rivals has anything to fear from an independent Kosovo? If he is unable to persuade the Russians that they should not use their veto, what contingency plans has he to deal with the situation in that event?

Jim Devine: May I also wish you a happy birthday, Mr. Speaker?
	Angela's relatives are constituents of mine, and they have asked me to thank my hon. Friend's Department for the support that they have received. Can they have an assurance that that support will continue?

Kim Howells: The middle east peace process is one of our highest priorities. Our objective remains a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The two-state solution is the only realistic basis for a just and lasting peace, despite Hamas' actions in Gaza. That means a viable state of Palestine living in peace and security alongside the state of Israel. Both parties need to fulfil their obligations in order for that to become a reality. The international community has a key role to play in helping to secure that outcome, and the Government are fully committed to doing whatever they can to help.

Gordon Brown: With permission, Mr. Speaker, my first, most important and most solemn duty is to pay tribute to the five members of our armed forces who lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past week. Corporal Paul Joszko of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Welsh, Private Scott Kennedy of The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland, and my constituent Private Jamie Kerr, also of The Black Watch, were all killed on patrol last Wednesday in Basra. Captain Sean Dolan of the 1st Battalion the Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters and Sergeant David Wilkinson of 19 Regiment Royal Artillery were killed at the weekend in Afghanistan. They served their country bravely, and the whole House will join me in sending our sincere condolences to their families.
	May I also pay tribute, Mr. Speaker, to the professionalism of our police, emergency services and security services over recent days, and applaud the heroism and vigilance of ordinary members of the British public? We owe them all a great debt of gratitude.
	All Members of this House and all the people of this country have a shared interest in building trust in our democracy, and it is my hope that, by working together for change in a spirit that takes us beyond parties and beyond partisanship, we can agree a new British constitutional settlement that entrusts more power to Parliament and the British people. Change with a new settlement is in my view essential to our country's future. For we will meet the new challenges of security, of economic change and of communities under pressure—and forge a stronger shared national purpose—only by building a new relationship between citizens and Government that ensures that Government are a better servant of the people.
	Let me pay tribute to the contribution to our thinking—and to the wider constitutional debate—that has already been made by parliamentarians in all parts of the House. Because I want this process to be one in which we consult and involve not only all political parties but the people of this country, what I propose today is not, and should be seen not as, the final blueprint for a constitutional settlement, but a route map towards it.
	The route map seeks to address two fundamental issues: to hold power more accountable and to uphold and enhance the rights and responsibilities of the citizen. While constitutional change will not be the work of just one Bill or one year or one Parliament, I can today make an immediate start by proposing changes that will transfer power from the Prime Minister and the Executive. For centuries, they have exercised authority in the name of the monarchy without the people and their elected representatives being consulted, so I now propose that in 12 important areas of our national life the Prime Minister and the Executive should surrender or limit their powers, the exclusive exercise of which by the Government of the day should have no place in a modern democracy. These are: the power of the Executive to declare war; the power to request the dissolution of Parliament; the power over recall of Parliament; the power of the Executive to ratify international treaties without decision by Parliament; the power to make key public appointments without effective scrutiny; the power to restrict parliamentary oversight of our intelligence services; power to choose bishops; power in the appointment of judges; power to direct prosecutors in individual criminal cases; power over the civil service itself; and the Executive powers to determine the rules governing entitlement to passports and the granting of pardons. I now propose to surrender or limit these powers to make for a more open 21st-century British democracy which better serves the British people.
	Let me set out the measures, the details of which are included in a Green Paper published today by the Secretary of State for Justice. While constitutional change should never limit our ability to deal with emergencies and should never jeopardise the security of our forces or any necessary operational decisions, the Government will now consult on a resolution to guarantee that on the grave issue of peace and war it is ultimately this House of Commons that will make the decision. I propose, in addition, to put on to a statutory footing Parliament's right to ratify new international treaties.
	We will also consult on proposals that this House of Commons would have to approve a resolution for any dissolution of Parliament requested by the Prime Minister and that, while at present members of Parliament cannot decide whether the House should be recalled, for the first time a majority of Members—and not just the Prime Minister—should have that right, subject to your authority, Mr. Speaker.
	The House of Commons should also have a bigger role in the selection of key public officials. I propose, as a first step, pre-appointment hearings for public officials whose role it is to protect the public's rights and interests, and for whom there is not currently independent scrutiny. That includes the chief inspector of prisons, the local government ombudsman, the civil service commissioner and the commissioner for public appointments. For public offices where appointments are acknowledged to be market-sensitive, the Chancellor is setting out today how pre-commencement hearings will apply to new members of the Monetary Policy Committee, including the Governor of the Bank of England, and the chairman of the Financial Services Authority. I also propose that we extend pre-commencement hearings in this House to utility regulators and other regulators. I propose that we review too the arrangements for making appointments to NHS boards, and it is right that this House of Commons vote on the appointment of the chair of the new independent Statistics Board.
	I can announce also that from now on the Government will regularly publish, for parliamentary debate and public scrutiny, our national security strategy. It will set out for the British people the threats we face and the objectives we pursue. I have said for some time that the long-term and continuing security obligations on us require us to co-ordinate military, policing, intelligence and diplomatic action—and also to win hearts and minds in this country and around the world. So following discussions over the last few months, I have decided to establish within Government a national security council, charged with bringing together our overseas defence and security, but also our development and community relations efforts, to send out a clear message that at all times we will be vigilant and we will never yield in addressing the terrorist threat.
	As the security agencies themselves recognise, greater accountability to Parliament can strengthen still further public support for the work that they do. So while ensuring necessary safeguards that respect confidentiality and security, we will now consult on whether and how the Intelligence and Security Committee can be appointed by, and report to, Parliament. And we will start now with hearings, held in public wherever possible; a strengthened capacity for investigations; reports subject to more parliamentary debate; and greater transparency over appointments to the Committee.
	The Church of England is, and should remain, the established Church in England. Establishment does not, however, justify the Prime Minister influencing senior Church appointments, including bishops. And I also propose that the Government should consider relinquishing their residual role in the appointment of judges.
	The role of Attorney-General, which combines legal and ministerial functions, needs to change. While we consult on reform, the Attorney-General has herself decided, except if the law or national security requires it, not to make key prosecution decisions in individual criminal cases.
	To reinforce the neutrality of the civil service, the core principles governing it will no longer be set at the discretion of the Executive but will be legislated by Parliament—and so this Government have finally responded to the central recommendation of the Northcote-Trevelyan report on the civil service made more than 150 years ago in 1854. The frameworks for granting pardons and for issuing and withdrawing passports should also be set not by Government but by Parliament. And I propose that we reduce the advance sight that Government Departments have of the release of statistical information from as much as five days currently to just 24 hours.
	Even as we now reduce the power of the Executive, we will also increase their accountability. Following the decision to revoke the provisions that previously allowed special advisers to give orders to civil servants, I am also publishing a new ministerial code today that provides for a new independent adviser to supervise disclosure and whom I can ask to scrutinise ministerial conduct, including conflicts of interest. I propose that we reinforce the accountability of the Executive to Parliament and to the public with a statement in the summer, prior to the Queen's Speech, on the provisional forward legislative programme, and this will start this month. Annual departmental reports will be debated in this House.
	But just as the Executive must become more accountable to Parliament, Parliament itself must become more accountable. Given the vote in this House in March for major reform of the House of Lords as a second and revising Chamber with provision for democratic election, a statement will be made by the Government before the recess as we press ahead with reform. A statement on the reform of local government will propose a new concordat between local and central Government. We will fulfil our manifesto obligation to publish our review of the experience of the various voting systems introduced since 1998, and the House will have a full opportunity to discuss in detail, and to vote here in this House on, the legislation that flows from the European Union amending treaty.
	Just as we have appointed Ministers for each region of England, I propose that, to increase the accountability of local and regional decision making, the House now consider creating Committees to review the economies and public services of each region, and we will propose a regular Question Time for regional Ministers. But while we will listen to all proposals to improve our constitution in the light of devolution, we do not accept the proposal for English votes for English laws, which would create two classes of Members of Parliament—some entitled to vote on all issues, some invited to vote on only some. We will do nothing to put at risk the Union. I am reminded—[ Interruption.]

Gordon Brown: I am reminded of the statement in 1999 by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis), the shadow Home Secretary, who said that English votes for English laws would cause constitutional chaos.
	The right of all the British people to have their voice heard is fundamental to our democracy and to holding public institutions to account. Britain is rightly proud to be the pioneer of the modern liberties of the individual. I think it right to make it a general rule that in these areas there is independent oversight of authorities and accountability to Parliament. I encourage the House to agree a new process for ensuring consideration of petitions from members of the public. Disengagement is too often reflected in low turnout in elections. Britain is unusual in holding elections on weekdays, when people are at work, and the Secretary of State for Justice will announce a consultation on whether there is a case for voting at weekends.
	The Government will also bring forward proposals to extend the period of time during which parties can use all-women short lists for candidate selections, and to give more time for all parties in this House to take up this new right, if they choose. While balancing the need for public order with the right to public dissent, I think it right—in consultation with the Metropolitan police, Parliament, the Mayor of London, Westminster city council and liberties groups—to change the laws that now restrict the right to demonstrate in Parliament square.
	The measures that I have just announced represent in my view an important step forward in changing the way we are governed, but it is possible to do more to bring Government closer to the people.
	While our system of representative democracy—local as well as national—is at the heart of our constitution, it can be enhanced by devolving more power directly to the people, and I propose that we start the debate and consult on empowering citizens and communities in four areas. The first is powers of initiative, extending the right of the British people to intervene with their elected local representatives to ensure action, through a new community right to call for action and new duties on public bodies to involve local people.
	The second is new rights for the British people to be consulted through mechanisms such as "citizens juries" on major decisions affecting their lives. The third is powers of redress, and new rights for the British people to scrutinise and improve the local delivery of services. The fourth is powers to ballot on spending decisions in areas such as neighbourhood budgets and youth budgets, with decisions on finance made by local people themselves.
	At the same time, we must give new life to the very idea of citizenship. All in this House would acknowledge that there are very specific challenges we must meet on engaging young people and improving citizenship education. I hope that there will be all-party support for a commission to review this and make recommendations. Although the voting age has been 18 since 1969, it is right, as part of that debate, to examine, and hear from young people themselves, whether lowering that age would increase participation. Consultation will take place with you, Mr. Speaker, and through the Leader of the House, with this House as to whether the Youth Parliament should be invited here in this Chamber once a year, on a non-sitting day.
	What constitutes citizens' rights, beyond voting, and citizens' responsibilities, such as jury service, should itself be a matter for public deliberation. As we focus on the challenges that we face and what unites and integrates our country, our starting point should be to discuss together and then, as other countries do, agree and set down the values, founded in liberty, which define our citizenship and help to define our country. And there is a case that we should go further still than this statement of values to codify either in concordats or in a single document both the duties and rights of citizens and the balance of power between Government, Parliament and the people.
	In Britain we have a largely unwritten constitution. To change that would represent a fundamental and historic shift in our constitutional arrangements. So it is right to involve the public in a sustained debate about whether there is a case for the United Kingdom developing a full British Bill of Rights and duties, or for moving towards a written constitution. Because such fundamental change should happen only when there is a settled consensus on whether to proceed, I have asked my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice to lead a dialogue within Parliament and with people across the United Kingdom by holding a series of hearings, starting in the autumn, in all regions and nations of the country, and we will consult with all the other parties on this process.
	So the changes that we propose today and the national debate we now begin are founded on the conviction that the best answer to disengagement from our democracy is to strengthen our democracy. It is my hope that this dialogue of all parties and the British people will lead to a new consensus, a more effective democracy and a stronger sense of shared national purpose. I commend this statement to the House.

Gordon Brown: Let me thank the Leader of the Opposition for his welcome to me and also for the sentiments that he expressed about those who have lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past week.
	I am grateful that the right hon. Gentleman has expressed the agreement of his Opposition party to a number of the proposals that we are putting forward—on the power of the Executive to declare war, on the power of the Executive to ratify international treaties and on the power to restrict parliamentary oversight of the intelligence services. I welcome that. I hope that he will, in time, agree with the other proposals that I have put forward to restrict the patronage of the Executive.
	I remember the right hon. Gentleman saying when he became the Leader of the Opposition that he hoped the era of Punch and Judy politics was over. Where we agree with him, I hope that we can make progress, and I hope that all other parties will join us in doing so. Where we disagree, I hope that we can have a vigorous debate that will lead eventually to a consensus in this country.
	I want to take up the issues on which the right hon. Gentleman has expressed his disagreement with us. First, he mentioned a British Bill of Rights and the question of whether we can deport people from this country. I can do no better on this matter than quote the chairman of his democracy commission, the man he appointed to do the job of looking at the reform of the constitution and who said that the Conservative proposals for a British Bill of Rights were "xenophobic and legal nonsense". I can only also quote the former tutor to the Leader of the Opposition at university. He said of him:
	"I think he is very confused. I've read his speech and it's filled with contradictions. There are one or two good things in it but one glimpses them, as it were, through a mist of misunderstanding...I'd be quite happy to give him a few more tutorials on civil liberties."
	Where we disagree on the European referendum, I can again do no better than quote the chairman of the democracy commission, who said— [ Interruption. ] We are seeking bipartisan agreement, but there is a case for some bipartisan agreement within the Conservative party itself. The chairman of the Conservative democracy commission said that the treaty referendum proposal put forward by the Conservative party was "Frankly absurd". He said:
	"a lot of intelligent, well-educated ...businessmen type constituents... would think I was dotty"
	 — [ Interruption. ]

Gordon Brown: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. I am sorry that he was not able to join me in the contest for the leadership of the Labour party. It is a matter for Parliament to decide whether to set up its own Committees on such matters. That is a matter for Parliament to vote on, but I hope that he agrees that the progress that we are making today, with my proposals for the Intelligence and Security Committee, show that we are aware of the need for our Select Committees not only to be able to conduct investigations within the House, but to be able to tell the nation, through public reports for which they are responsible, about the work of services such as the security services. By all means, let my right hon. Friend put forward his proposals for the House to decide—but I hope that he will agree that we have made progress on the Intelligence and Security Committee today.

Elfyn Llwyd: I congratulate the Prime Minister on his appointment, and I speak on behalf of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National party. In his statement, he referred to being beyond politics and partisanship, so in that spirit will he review the convention whereby the Attorney-General's full legal opinion is not usually disclosed to the House of Commons? If not, does he envisage that at some time Parliament will be able to commission its own legal opinion?
	I welcome the right hon. Gentleman's proposal to limit the prerogative powers, and we will do whatever we can to assist him in that in order to address the imbalance between the Executive and Parliament.
	On devolution, will the right hon. Gentleman confirm that he will do all in his power to ensure that devolution in Wales—the unfinished business—will proceed accordingly and that eventually we will be able to put in place all the Richard commission's suggestions?

Paul Flynn: I warmly congratulate the Prime Minister on his splendid statement that will reverse that damaging tendency of at least 50 years of concentrating more and more power in the hands of the Executive and the Prime Minister. I particularly welcome, on behalf of the 1,300 people who work in the Office for National Statistics in Newport, the news that the chairperson of the board, whoever he or she may be, will be elected by Parliament. That comes after the decision last night to accept the Lords amendments to the Statistics and Registration Service Bill, which will do a great deal to strengthen the validity of national statistics.

Kenneth Clarke: I welcome the scope of the debate that the Prime Minister has opened today with his statement, and if it concludes successfully I hope that he will feel personally comfortable if he is the Prime Minister in a more open, accountable, collective and democratic Government.
	If the House of Commons is to be properly strengthened vis-à-vis the Executive, surely it is essential that it has more control over its timetable so that there is some ability to debate matters when they are still timely and events are unfolding and might be influenced, and that it should strengthen Select Committees by reviving the proposal of the former Leader of the House, Robin Cook, when he was in the Cabinet, that the Chairmen of Select Committees should be selected by secret ballot of every Member of the House. If the right hon. Gentleman embraced both those propositions, we would make a substantial step forward towards strengthening Parliament vis-à-vis the Executive.

Gordon Brown: The virtue of the process that we are starting is that the very issue that she has raised can be part of the discussion in moving forward. I know that there is concern in some areas of the country about both the accountability and the representativeness of the people who sit on boards and committees. During the course of the debate, we can consider whether some of those issues can be addressed. I look forward to debating them.

David Howarth: The Prime Minister did not respond to one of the questions asked by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), namely, that about electoral reform. Will he state his personal view on electoral reform for this House? Does he recognise that having a Government who are invariably elected by a minority among the voters of this country undermines the legitimacy of all Governments?

Gordon Brown: That would indeed be a constitutional innovation. The Executive must have members in both Houses and having good Ministers, such as those whom we appointed in the House of Lords, is important to the Government's functioning. Obviously, the future of the House of Lords and the status of election in it is a central question that must be resolved first.

Steve Webb: From his statement, the right hon. Gentleman clearly agrees that it is wrong for the Prime Minister to be able to call a general election on a whim, possibly for party advantage. Does not that equally apply to the governing party's power in the Green Paper to do precisely that? Will he therefore seriously consider fixed-term Parliaments, starting with the current one?

Quentin Davies: One or two Conservative Members are understandably sore about some home truths that I had to tell them the other day. I sympathise with that reaction, which does not entirely surprise me.
	As I said, the object of the Bill is to give people an option that they do not currently have, thereby adding to the liberty of the subject. It means that, when people are in a relationship or contemplating a relationship or marriage, they can decide with their partner or potential partner the exact basis for the distribution of any assets or liabilities if the relationship fails. It is important to emphasise the voluntary aspect of the proposals.
	My Bill would remove two major anomalies of the present time—most significantly a legal anomaly. The present situation is one in which people can contract in all sorts of ways and reach agreements that will be enforced in the courts—purchase and sale contracts provide a good example, but people can also contract to make agency agreements, exclusivity agreements, service agreements, employment contracts and all sorts of agreements to do with the management and distribution of intellectual property. In all those cases, they can do so with the expectation that if there is a dispute, the agreement will be enforced subsequently in a court in accordance with its terms and subject to normal common law safeguards, which would certainly apply to my Bill. I refer to safeguards such as no undue influence, no material non-disclosure and so forth. Many contracts will be enforced by a court even if they are purely oral. It is only in the event of a contract that provides the transfer of real estate that a court will require a written agreement or a written contract.
	There is only one other area where a signed agreement or a contract otherwise drawn up is not enforceable in law—and that is a gambling contract or arrangement. I happen to sympathise with that exception to the law, but I simply cannot think what gambling has to do with pre-nuptial agreements or why pre-nuptial agreements should be treated in the same fashion.
	There have been a number of high-profile cases in the matrimonial courts recently. One thinks, for example, of the Miller case, the Charman case and the McCartney case, which is presently before the courts. Colleagues may think that those cases have inspired me to bring forward this measure at this moment, but that is not the case. In the context of some of these high-profile cases, it is true that judges have expressed the view that the present law is very unsatisfactory and unfortunately sends a signal to the public that one way of becoming supremely rich in one's own right is to marry someone who is very rich, stay with him or her for a few years and then walk off with half the proceeds. That is clearly an undesirable and unattractive aspect of the present law.
	However, it was not those particular cases but rather the situation of people on very modest means that inspired me to propose this measure. I am thinking of people who have just a few assets, perhaps a family house, and who want to protect those assets not only for their own sake but more especially—I am thinking of specific cases now—to protect their children, perhaps their children from their first marriage. The first marriage may have ended in divorce or widowhood and the person may subsequently fall in love with somebody else and want to live with or marry somebody else— [Interruption.] Indeed, such changes do happen in life. Such people may want to protect the children from their first relationship from any dispute that might subsequently occur if the relationship breaks down. That is an important aspect of the potential injustice that currently occurs.
	There have been suggestions that the law should be changed to provide the same regime as currently applies to married couples—in respect of the distribution of assets in the event of a breakdown—to co-habitees who are not married. I am not in favour of going down that road— [Interruption.] I have to say that if the House in its wisdom decided to go down that road one day, it would seem to be particularly important to have on the statute book something like the mechanism that I am currently proposing. Otherwise people currently in such a relationship would find that they faced an invidious and nightmarish choice of either ending the relationship or finding retrospectively that they face a whole number of risks and liabilities that they could not previously have contemplated and would never have voluntarily entered into.
	Let me make one final point. I said that the most important anomaly that I was addressing with this Bill was a legal anomaly. I believe that to be the case, but the measure also resolves a curious geographical anomaly. In other major common law jurisdictions such as the United States and Australia, the option to sign pre-nuptial contracts exists and they are indeed enforced in law. That is also the case in a number of European Union countries where Roman law applies. One might think that the need for a pre-nuptial agreement would not be so great in such countries, because the relevant principle of Roman law states that, if a marriage is dissolved, the assets belonging to each party when the marriage was contracted are reserved to that party. Any dispute over distribution applies only to assets and liabilities that were accumulated during the course of the marriage. That principle applies in Scotland, which also has a legal system based on Roman law. Although the need for this measure might be less great in some other EU countries, the option nevertheless exists for their citizens to use it. It does not exist in England or, indeed, in Scotland.
	It is time for the House to consider this measure; it is time that it was brought in. I have the honour to commend it to the House.

Opposition Day
	 — 
	[15th allotted day]

Andrew Lansley: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, and I entirely agree with his point. The new Prime Minister has stated that he must listen to what the public and NHS professionals are saying throughout the country, but he cannot do that in circumstances where—as is happening in many places—top-down reconfiguration of services is being forced upon local health care economies. I was recently in Hastings in my hon. Friend's part of the country. The ways in which the reconfigurations are to be applied raise serious questions both of the evidential basis for them and of access considerations in respect of the services that will result. I will say more about that.

Anne Snelgrove: The hon. Gentleman believes that reconfiguration should be halted and the medical profession should be listened to. However, what he recommends is the opposite of what is being said by Professor Roger Boyle, national director of Heart Disease and Stroke? He said that reorganising services could lead to 500 fewer deaths, 1,000 fewer heart attacks and 250,000 fewer serious complications such as stroke. Does the hon. Gentleman not agree that that is a firm medical basis on which to reconfigure services?

Andrew Lansley: I do not know what world the hon. Gentleman is living in, but he is not living in Lincolnshire, because I remember the conversation that he and I had with the chairman of the United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust; however, I will not go further down that path.
	It is not only Opposition Members who believe that it is necessary for there to be a moratorium on the service reconfigurations that are proceeding in the absence of support or evidence. The new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in the deputy leadership election, at least had the honesty to say that
	"we need a moratorium on structural change and reorganisation in the NHS."
	So we have support from within the Cabinet ranks.
	I will come back to accident and emergency departments, but I wish to start with primary care, because we seek a primary care-led service. I wondered where the new Prime Minister had been in recent years when, during his leadership election, he talked about access to GP services, because the GP contract has reduced GP access. We do not know to what extent, because the Department of Health has failed to publish the patient access survey that it commissioned at great expense. But we do know that the introduction of the out-of-hours contract was a shambles, according to the Public Accounts Committee. We know that NHS Direct has shut 12 of its 50 call centres, including the one in Cambridge, which I visited, because the planned expansion of NHS Direct has been abandoned.
	Walk-in centres have been cut back. The figures for early 2006, compared to 2005, recorded fewer people attending walk-in centres. Indeed, fewer people visit walk-in centres in a year than visit GP practices in just three days. We have also seen community hospitals closed, local A and E services downgraded and birth centres and local maternity units threatened with closure. Care closer to home, which was a mantra of the previous Secretary of State, is turning, in many cases, into care further away from home. Care closer to home is not happening.
	I welcome to the Front Bench the new Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ann Keen), who was president of the Community and District Nursing Association. We have fewer district nurses and health visitors now, but they are the very people we most need to deliver care closer to home and reduce demand for these services. It is only really in circumstances in which demand for hospital services is reduced that it would be safe or appropriate to reduce the supply of services. What we have at the moment is a structure that is trying to ration demand for care by restricting supply of care, and that is no good.

Helen Jones: Well, the hon. Gentleman mentioned community hospitals and if he will allow me, I will quote the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), who said
	"there are occasions when community hospitals have to be closed. Politicians, we may not like saying it, but we've all fought for our community hospitals. Some community hospitals are very old and can't really be done up. So difficult decisions do have to be taken."
	Does the hon. Gentleman agree with his hon. Friend or not?

John Bercow: My hon. Friend rightly focuses on the services provided by PCTs. The Government are right to emphasise the importance of early intervention, but in Aylesbury Vale there are no fewer than 400 young children who are not statemented. Some of them are pre-school children, while others are on school action or school action-plus, but they have not received the speech and language therapy that they desperately need. Can my hon. Friend offer a way forward in terms of collaborative exercises and joined-up government, so that the children who desperately need help get it before it is too late?

Andrew Lansley: I share my hon. Friend's distress about the matter. It is clear that, on the criterion of access to services, his constituency will be extremely badly served by decisions that have emanated from the Government and are contrary to all that was said in the Government White Paper in January 2006.
	Let me come to the points that I hope that the Secretary of State will have in mind. I understand that he has been in his post for only six days, but we need to get the immediate priorities up front. The following are among the things that he needs to do. He needs to start by working with primary care and especially family doctors. GP- bashing, which seems to have been the preoccupation of Ministers, has to stop—it is no good going down that path. Hamish Meldrum, the new chairman of the British Medical Association, has said:
	"We are experiencing an unprecedented volume of misinformation, half-truths and politically- inspired doctor-bashing".
	That does not mean that one should just let GPs do as they like, but we know that GPs will respond if they have the right framework and incentives. The clearly required principal incentive, which has not been present in the new contract, is empowerment, professional autonomy and the ability to take decisions as senior public service and clinical professionals about real budgets, real commissioning and real opportunities to shape services.
	Today, the NHS is not a primary care-led service but a centrally controlled service. The top-down initiatives are not working. Measures such as the 48-hour access target have been counter-productive, driving patients and practices into an absurd 8.30 am telephone scramble. Choose and book has been hopelessly mishandled and has compromised the freedom to refer that GPs always had.
	Out-of-hours services under the new contract have de-emphasised the role of general practitioners. The hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford will recall that we had to fight that one too, because GPs simply did not form part of the out-of-hours service in south Lincolnshire, and we had to persuade Ministers to involve them. I know that I have mentioned the hon. Gentleman, but I will not give way: we are just agreed about that issue, and we will settle it on that.
	Things can be changed. Let us take practice-based commissioning. Ministers, after a decade, have finally realised that the fundamentals of fundholding need to be brought back. GPs can take control of the commissioning of services, and that should include the commissioning of out-of-hours services. They can integrate those services more effectively with their own services.
	The Department has also failed to publish an urgent care strategy, despite the fact that, at the beginning of last year, the White Paper stated that one of the jobs for 2006 was to produce such a strategy. I do not know whether the Department has admitted it to the Secretary of State, but it should have been done last year and it has not been done yet, and we are in July. We need an urgent care strategy which says to patients, "It is very straightforward how you access urgent care. If it is an emergency, you ring 999." Some of our concerns about accident and emergency services would be met by such a strategy. We understand, however, that if someone is in an ambulance with a paramedic, they may not necessarily go to the local A and E, but instead go to a specialist centre for trauma, stroke and heart attack. Apart from that, however, we need a much more integrated urgent care structure. If it is not a 999 call and an emergency, the call should be made to 0845 4647, which would offer access not just to NHS Direct but to the necessary core handling and triage that determines whether an emergency response by an ambulance, a doctor response through the out-of-hours service, or a nurse or emergency care practitioner response is appropriate, or whether the person should be advised to attend a walk-in centre or an A and E department, visit their general practice the following day or receive advice on the telephone.

Andrew Lansley: I am really grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, because she sums up exactly the experience of so many constituents throughout the country, rather than the rhetoric we keep hearing. After the failed combination of arrogance and incompetence that has characterised the Labour party's approach to health policy for past decade, the starting point should be the experience of constituents—what they are feeling and what they see happening in their health service locally. That is what our approach will be.

Andrew Lansley: No, because I have already given way to the hon. Lady.
	I was talking about what we need to do to co-ordinate urgent care. It is necessary for NHS Direct properly to be franchised out. As I have told the House before, NHS Direct call handlers, ambulance trust call handlers and out of hours call handlers can all be in the same room—for example, as they are in Cornwall or Norwich—yet they cannot have an integrated system of triage and referral to deal with patients. When patients ring in, they have to speak to each service separately. After all these years, that system is absurd.
	Walk-in centres are another issue that has been left in the Secretary of State's in-tray. Two articles have been published, one of which said that walk-in centres have had no impact on access to emergency care locally and the other said that they have had no impact in reducing demand on GP services. Questions about the costs and benefits of walk-in centres need to be dealt with.
	Somewhere there is a review of funding for walk-in centres. It has not been published, yet cover at the walk-in centre in Luton has dropped from about 107 hours a week, including weekends, to 20 hours during weekdays only.

John Redwood: Does my hon. Friend agree not only that people are upset about having to travel much longer distances to hospital, but they are worried that when they are in those large monopoly hospitals they will be more prone to hospital-acquired infections, which puts them at considerable risk when they are already vulnerable?

Andrew Lansley: I share my right hon. Friend's concerns. Furthermore, he represents a part of the country that secures the lowest per capita distribution of resources. The Select Committee on Health made it clear, as we had argued, that there should be a review of the resource allocation formula to make it fairer in distributing resources relative to the burden of disease. It is interesting that the Secretary of State's predecessor handed him one admission of our arguments. Only the week before last, the right hon. Lady said that the Advisory Committee on Resource Allocation should be given Bank of England-style independence. She acknowledged that we were right and that it had been the subject of political interference. In a letter to me on her last day in office, she also accepted our argument that the principal cause of variation in health-related need in the burden of disease is age, so as an urgent measure I look forward to an independent review of resource allocation to deliver a fairer distribution across the country.
	The purpose of the debate is partly to set out the things that need to be done. Local services, such as accident and emergency and maternity services, should not be shut down in the absence of evidence of what constitutes safe, accessible and good quality care. I hope that tomorrow the Secretary of State will say that he will have such a moratorium.
	The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State should not be wandering around the country saying that they are going to listen and then overriding things before they happen. We need care closer to home to mean exactly that, and not have services taken away that people have relied upon for a great deal of time. We need to know whether the Prime Minister has any substance to add to what he said in passing at the outset of his leadership campaign, or does he, as it turns out, have hidden shallows to him? Where in the Government amendment is the recognition that they must do better? If that is what the new Prime Minister said in his leadership campaign, why is it not reflected in the Government's self-congratulatory amendment?
	Morale in the NHS is at an all-time low. The  Health Service Journal asked NHS staff about morale and published the results the week before last. It asked whether morale in the NHS was excellent and 0 per cent. said that it was. Some 4 per cent. said that morale was good and 30 per cent. said that it was moderate. However, 41 per cent. said that it was poor and 25 per cent. that it was very poor. That is nearly two thirds.
	The Secretary of State is a former general secretary of a trade union and he must know that relations between the leadership of the NHS and the staff of the NHS are at all-time low. Even in his own Department, morale is low. Direction and leadership are badly needed, and we must have greater autonomy for health care professionals to re-empower and motivate them. We must have accountability to patients exercising choice and a public voice on these issues. We need evidence for the policies that are being pursued rather than simply a slash-and-burn pursuit of the Government's fiscal targets, which are delivering inequitable access to care in too many parts of the country. Not least, we need strong commissioning decisions taken closer to the patients and stronger primary care-led commissioning in urgent care.
	We have a clear vision for an NHS that is patient centred and professionally led. It is a vision of an NHS accountable for its outcomes and not hamstrung by targets and in which we recognise that access to NHS care, as well the safety of care, is integral to quality services. It is a vision of what is, indeed, a national health service that respects the diversity and needs of patients at every level and one that incorporates the essential principles that have stood the NHS in good stead for nearly 60 years and that puts them right at the centre of NHS care.
	I hope that this is a starting point from which we and the Secretary of State and his ministerial team can work together positively and constructively to deliver a service that lives up not only to those principles, but to the ambitions of the people who work in the NHS and not least of those who depend upon it. I commend the motion to the House.

Alan Johnson: I beg to move, To leave out from "House" to end and add:
	"supports the Government's trebling of investment in the NHS by 2008 and welcomes the recent confirmation of an extra £8 billion for 2007-08; congratulates the staff and the medical professions for their hard work and commitment in helping progress towards this Government's historic maximum 18 week wait from GP referral to treatment; welcomes the extra choice available to patients with new services more convenient for their lives including around 90 NHS walk-in centres and the £750 million programme for developing community facilities providing care closer to home; recognises the achievement of the NHS in delivering a wide range of quality personal services convenient for patients including NHS Direct, 23 new independent sector treatment centres increasing choice; further welcomes the 280,000 extra staff working for the NHS since 1997 including 80,000 more nurses and 35,000 more doctors; further welcomes the fact that over 85 per cent. of all GP practices have used Choose and Book to refer their patients to hospital and that over three million Choose and Book appointments have been made so far, allowing patients to choose appointments that are at convenient times to fit in with their lives; and recognises the need to ensure that the views of NHS staff and patients are paramount and that Government must engage fully in a dialogue with them about the future of the NHS.".
	I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) for welcoming me to the Dispatch Box and for the copy of the Conservative party document. I have had my attention drawn to many documents that could profoundly influence the NHS, but this was not among them. I will have a look at it in good time.
	I pay tribute to my predecessor. My right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt) is a woman of great courage, great intelligence and great ability—more courage, intelligence and ability than the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) possesses in his little finger, incidentally. I pay tribute to her for the tremendous work that she has done in my Department.
	I have been in post for the equivalent of only 10 minutes, I suppose, but my party has been in government for 10 years, so perhaps the best way to open my speech is to look back briefly at the health service that we inherited in 1997. The service was starved of essential funding; indeed, we were investing as a proportion of our GDP at about the level of the Czech Republic and Poland and well below the level of France, Germany and Sweden. Every winter heralded a new crisis, waiting lists topped 1 million and the chronic bed shortage meant that elderly patients were turfed out in the middle of night while critically ill children were denied essential intensive care. All that has changed.
	In 1997, patients were left on trolleys in accident and emergency departments for hours, or even days, waiting for admission. Now nearly 98 per cent. of patients are either admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours of arrival. In March 1997, 284,000 patients had been on a waiting list for an operation for more than six months. Today, that figure is less than 500. In 1997, half of all NHS hospital buildings had been built before the NHS was created. Now, thanks to the biggest hospital building programme ever seen in this country, it is less than a fifth.
	Ten years on, the position has been transformed thanks to greater investment, difficult but necessary system reform and, above all, the tremendous work of those who work for the NHS. We have trebled the health budget and there are now almost 80,000 more nurses and more than 36,000 more doctors. Cancer death rates are down by 15.7 per cent., saving more than 50,000 lives. Death rates from heart disease are down by 35.9 per cent., saving nearly 150,000 lives. Since 2000, 231 new CT scanners and 158 new MRI scanners have been installed in hospitals.

Graham Stuart: Uncharacteristically, the Secretary of State has not started with the humility that is needed, given the Government's record. The Conservatives recognise the increase in expenditure, but, like the public and those who work in the NHS, we have not seen value for money from that expenditure. Will the Secretary of State, on his first outing, accept that that is fundamentally true—as the Prime Minister appeared to in his leadership campaign—and tell the House that he feels we must do better in getting value for money for the vastly increased resources that, to give the Government credit, have been introduced to the NHS?

Alan Johnson: May I say how pleased I am that the hon. Gentleman is the Liberal Democrat spokesman? We have history, the hon. Member for Norfolk South— [ Interruption. ] We have history, the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and I—although it does not extend to my remembering his constituency accurately. He is absolutely right: of course we will never be in a state of absolute perfection in the NHS. What I am setting out—and what I am using to counter the points made by the Opposition—is that we are making huge strides forwards. I will come later to some of the issues that we still need to address, but it is right to put the debate in the context of where we were in 1997 and where we are now.

Charles Walker: I welcome the Secretary of State to his new position. I knew him for a number of years before I came to this place and he is a man of great integrity and decency. As Secretary of State, he is in a profoundly important position when it comes to having an impact on the future of the NHS. In my constituency, we face the closure of hospital services in north London and services in the north of my constituency, in Welwyn. May I prevail upon him to grant me a 10 or 15 minute meeting so that I can discuss my concerns? We are between a rock and a hard place.

Jim Cunningham: I hope that in his speech my right hon. Friend will draw attention to the fact that before 1997 we did not have sufficient numbers of doctors and nurses. In Coventry, we now have a brand new hospital.

Alan Johnson: My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we can go much further as regards the 10,000 pharmacies in this country offering services. We can go much further on access to primary care services, too; I will come to that subject in a moment. Thanks to medical developments, we are all living longer, and the number of people over 85 is set to increase by two thirds by 2026. Technological advances mean that operations that were once considered miraculous are increasingly commonplace. I cite the case of the heart transplant given last week to 18-month-old baby Zoe Chambers, who is from Hull in my constituency. We now live in a far more consumer-oriented culture, where customers rightly expect goods and services to be provided at times convenient to them.
	That leads me directly to the issue of access, which is the topic of today's debate. We need to ensure that our provision is flexible and responsive enough to meet the demands of hard-working families, who face competing demands on their time. In 1997, surgeries were frequently shut at the times when patients needed them most, such as lunch time, after work and at weekends. It was hard to make an appointment, and the surgeries were often in a squalid state of disrepair. Since then, more than 3,000 GP premises have been rebuilt or refurbished. Nine out of 10 patients can now see a GP within two working days, and more than three quarters of patients say that they are seen as soon as they think it necessary. In 1997, just half of patients said the same thing.

David Burrowes: The Secretary of State will appreciate that he comes to his post at the very time that the plans to downgrade accident and emergency and maternity services at Chase Town hospital have been published. Has he had an opportunity to look at the report, and will he join Sir George Alberti in recognising that there needs to be investment in primary care services and an expansion of the capacity of Barnet and North Middlesex University hospitals for the plans to be in any way viable? Does he recognise the cross-party opposition and fundamental local opposition to the plans?

Norman Lamb: I join in welcoming the Secretary of State and the rest of the ministerial team to their new roles. I believe that we all agree that the national health service is so vital that it is important that they do well in their respective roles. The Secretary of State is right to say that there is some history between us. I remember the Employment Bill in the previous Parliament and my role then as Department of Trade and Industry spokesman. He has always been good and courteous to deal with and I wish him well.
	The Secretary of State was also right to allude to the state of the NHS in 1997. The proportion of GDP spent on health in 1997 was 6.8 per cent., compared with 9.1 per cent. in the rest of the European Union. That was an enormous gap, which amounted to almost criminal neglect of the health service. The results were clear for all to see. I remember people coming to see me who had to wait three or four years for hip or knee joint operations; the cancer survival rates were appalling compared with other European countries; and so on. The Conservative party has nothing of which to be proud in its record in government. However, the picture that the Secretary of State painted of what has happened since is too rosy and I want to raise some specific issues. I hope that he will take them seriously and reflect on them, especially the important matter of equitable access to services, which the motion rightly covers.
	The motion is broadly uncontroversial—it is pretty much motherhood and apple pie. I am sure that the Government will vote against motherhood and apple pie, but we will support the motion because we agree with its content. Of course, it is easy to make the commitment, but much more difficult to achieve the motion's objectives. It is crucial to consider the way in which policies and proposals affect and influence the prospects of achieving equitable access. Like the Conservative spokesman, I want to acknowledge the extraordinary role that staff play in the NHS. We are remarkably lucky as a country to have such a dedicated work force and we all rely on their work. They are a dedicated group of professionals.
	Before considering equitable access, I want to highlight a part of the motion about which I am concerned. It is the Conservative proposal in their policy document, which I have read, and in the motion for a shift towards practice-based commissioning. There are limits to the extent to which it is sensible to proceed in that direction. Several organisations have expressed concerns about the impact of too much reliance on that. A couple of years ago, the Sainsbury Centre produced a report on the potential impact of practice-based commissioning on mental health. It stated:
	"Plans to allow GPs to commission a wider range of mental health treatments will result in substandard care".
	The report referred especially to the previous fundholding scheme, which operated under the Conservative Government, and the risk of neglect of patients with severe and enduring illnesses. If we are holding a serious debate, it is important that the Conservatives understand and recognise the potential risks of practice-based commissioning.
	In June last year, the Audit Commission criticised the Government's plans for practice-based commissioning. It said that the scheme risked "exacerbating financial pressures", "widening inequalities" and "wasting money". Those conclusions were based on where practice-based commissioning had been initiated and appeared to be working well. There are, therefore, concerns about the scheme, and conflicts of interest could arise when GPs can commission services from organisations that they set up.

Norman Lamb: I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman's report deals with that, but it is a legitimate concern.
	Let me deal with equitable access to services and the related issue of health inequalities. The Secretary of State referred in his deputy leadership campaign to his specific concerns about health inequalities. I therefore know that he genuinely takes that seriously and I hope that the need to reduce inequalities will be a top priority for him. In 2002, the Government made a commitment—with which, I am sure, he is familiar—that by 2010 they would reduce inequalities in health outcomes by 10 per cent., as measured by infant mortality and life expectancy at birth. That is a legitimate direction in which to try to move.
	However, this year's departmental report highlights a shift in the other direction: health inequalities in our country are increasing. On infant mortality, it stated that the gap had widened and that the rate for routine and manual workers was 18 per cent. higher than that for the total population, compared with 13 per cent. in 1997-99. The Department's statistics for 2001-03 show that among the most affluent, there were 2.9 infant deaths per 1,000 live births compared with 8.9 per 1,000 live births among the poorest members of our community. That is a stark contrast between the life chances of people born in good circumstances and those born in our most disadvantaged communities. I am sure that all Members are concerned about that and we need to find ways to reduce that gap.
	The gap in life expectancy has increased, and it has done so most among women. The relative gap among women has increased by 8 per cent.; among men, it has increased by 2 per cent. Again, the Department's statistics for 2001-03 found that in the best area in the country—east Dorset, for some reason; it is a reasonably affluent area—men could expect to live to the age of 80, whereas in Manchester they could expect to live to the age of 71.8. That is a stark difference, which we should all find unacceptable.
	Do those differences have anything to do with the health service or are they all to do with much broader factors? Clearly, many factors such as poverty, deprivation, lifestyle and so on, play a part, but health care is relevant. Let me draw the Secretary of State's attention to programme budgeting—a new development that the Department has pursued—which enables us to compare areas and consider not only how much is spent on each specialty, but the outcomes in each specialty. We can therefore ascertain the effectiveness of the money in each area of the country. A recent report concluded that there was a clear link between spending and health outcomes. If we commit resources where they are most needed, we can achieve improvements in health and longer life expectancy.
	On the same issue of equitable access, I want to deal with access to GPs. In the least deprived PCT areas there are 62.5 GPs per 100,000 of the population, while in the most deprived there are just 54.2 per 100,000. Thus the areas with the greatest health problems have the fewest GPs as a proportion of the population. It is the wrong way around. All that points to a failure of policy—given that the Government highlighted the importance of the matter and set a target for reducing health inequalities in 2002, moving in the opposite direction is unacceptable.
	What are the prospects for reversing those trends? I would like briefly to look at the issue of choice. There is a risk, which many people highlight, that increasing choice actually has the effect of accentuating inequalities, the argument being that the middle classes can exploit those opportunities while others cannot. There is a very good report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, called "Equitable Choices for Health", which highlighted the potential risks. It referred to a pilot in London—the London patient choice project—in which disadvantaged people were given help with transport and given advice by patient care advisers about how best to exercise choice of hospital, treatment and so forth. The conclusion was that the pilot had had a positive impact on reducing inequalities. It had empowered people, particularly those at the bottom end of the income scale.
	However, the report also pointed out that when the Government rolled out patient choice nationally, none of those support mechanisms was in place. There was no help with transport and no guidance on how people should exercise choice. The IPPR's conclusion was that under the Government's scheme, choice was likely to increase inequality. I hope that the Secretary of State will further examine those conclusions from the research and consider how best to ensure that choice actually empowers the least powerful in society, rather than accentuating differences in health outcomes.
	I need to deal with the impact of deficits. The Secretary of State has perhaps arrived at a good moment because his predecessor had a pretty tough year. She made a political commitment to ensure that the NHS as a whole was in balance by the end of the financial year. She achieved that, but there are questions about the price that was paid to do so. The Health Committee drew attention to the fact that in the efforts to clear deficits some serious soft targets were hit. Particular attention was drawn to mental health services, which have been cut back in many parts of the country, including my own county of Norfolk. It is the same with public health programmes. Cutting back on alcohol prevention work, smoking cessation work and other programmes often hits the most disadvantaged people and again has the effect of accentuating inequalities in health outcomes. If the Secretary of State is serious about his commitment to reducing inequalities, those are the sorts of issues with which he needs to deal.
	I also want to draw attention to the extent of geographical variation in access to health care—the so-called health care lottery. It is often said that one of the risks of moving towards a more decentralised system—one that I favour—is that we end up with a postcode lottery. Well, the fact is that we already have a postcode lottery with a vengeance under the existing highly centralised system. Another problem is that there is no local accountability to achieve any change. One example of variation in access to services is care of the elderly. There is massive variation in how the criteria are interpreted from one area to another, so that people in one area can get access to free long-term care for the elderly under the NHS, but people in another area cannot. The Secretary of State should also look further into audiology—another example of where the variations are enormous. Hundreds of thousands of people are on a waiting list for digital hearing aids. In some parts of the country, there is no wait at all—the Health Committee looked into that—while in other areas people are waiting two or more years for access to and the fitting of a digital hearing aid. Reassessments for people who have had an analogue hearing aid and who want a digital one can involve a wait of up to 260 weeks or five years.
	Macular degeneration—a condition under which people lose their sight—provides yet another example of where people in some parts of the country can get access to the drugs that prevent sufferers from going blind and others cannot. People living in the no-access areas who have money are okay because they can ultimately pay for the treatment, but people who have no money go blind. It is as simple as that. I would hope that we all find that completely unacceptable, yet it is happening now and it needs to be dealt with. The excuse provided by many PCTs is that they are waiting for a ruling from NICE. In fact, NICE has provided a rather unfavourable ruling, which leads me to question the criteria that it follows.
	Variations across the country are enormous. The subject of dentistry and orthodontic waiting times may have been mentioned in an earlier sedentary intervention. The waiting time is enormous in some parts of the country. More general access to NHS dentists is another problem. In some areas, it is almost a thing of the past. Many people moving to a new area can often simply not get access to an NHS dentist.

Norman Lamb: I am grateful for that intervention and I suspect that the Secretary of State will be aware of that. Waits of that length are unacceptable. There is a genuine and serious debate to be had about how best to use public funds to ensure access to top-quality dental care for those who need it most.
	Two or three years ago, the Audit Commission was very critical of the ineffective use of public money to ensure access to NHS care for those who cannot afford the option of going private. The King's Fund pointed out massive variations in spending on mental health across the country last year, while Sir Liam Donaldson also highlighted concerns about treatment following a heart attack, which varies enormously from one part of the country to another.
	I would like briefly to consider the Conservative party proposals set out in their paper. The Conservatives have campaigned vigorously over recent years against reconfigurations, hospital closures and so forth, but I believe that the inevitable consequence of their proposals will be to make reconfigurations and closures more rather than less likely. The critical issue then becomes: who decides under Conservative policy if and when a hospital should close? As I have already said, the Conservatives propose a substantial shift of budgets towards practice-based commissioning, very much giving power to GPs rather than to PCTs. They also propose a significant shift towards using the private sector while their document also endorses, of course, the principle of payment by results. The inevitable consequence will be that some hospitals will become unviable. The Conservative spokesman referred to the importance of care closer to home, which is again likely to make some hospitals unviable.
	I would like to see a degree of honesty from Conservative Members on this issue— [Interruption.] The critical issue, as I have said, is who decides to close the hospital. Ultimately, it will be the national NHS board. If and when the system came into force, local people would end up asking why an unaccountable, national, remote quango was closing their local hospital. That is the inevitable consequence of what is being proposed. The board will take decisions, independently of Parliament, to close local hospitals.
	I consulted the Library to check that my understanding of the document was correct and it appeared to agree with me. Specific reference was made to paragraph 2.17, which talks about HealthWatch, the new body to safeguard patients' interests.
	It states:
	"HealthWatch will have statutory rights to be consulted over decisions which affect how NHS care is provided in an area. It will also be able to make representations to the NHS Board in relation to the planning of NHS services, such as where an Accident and Emergency Department closure is proposed."
	That is remarkable. In a decentralised world—which I thought the Conservatives believed in—we would have the NHS board deciding whether to close an A and E department. That is utterly ridiculous. I can imagine what local people would feel when such a decision was taken by a remote national quango. I do not think that it would be as attractive a proposition in reality as it might seem in theory.
	I accept that tough decisions have to be made and that services sometimes have to be reconfigured. We have to ensure that health care is delivered in the safest possible way.

Norman Lamb: As I have already outlined in some detail, there is a real risk that, in achieving the result that the Conservatives say they are concerned about, we might lose local hospitals even though they are socially important for delivering care to a particular area, because of the drift of the market following decisions made by GPs. There would be no powerful local body with a role to play in such arrangements. The public would have no say in what happened and, ultimately, it would be the national board that made the decision to close the local A and E unit, for example. I do not think that that would be the right way to proceed.
	As I was saying, I accept that tough decisions have to be made, but they should be made locally. This is where I disagree with the Government's approach. Interestingly, one of the Labour deputy leadership candidates floated the idea of locally elected boards. The former Secretary of State even floated the idea of elected boards. It was interesting to hear the new Secretary of State, towards the end of his speech, using words that were identical to those in a speech given by the former Secretary of State at the London School of Economics about three weeks ago. Perhaps there will not be too much change of approach. It is interesting that, after all the tough experiences that the former Secretary of State has had, she recognises that there is a democratic deficit that has to be addressed.
	The motion also refers to the importance of community hospitals. The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart) has been prominent in his campaigning for community hospitals and I applaud his work. I have been campaigning in my constituency to protect a number of community hospitals that are under threat. I urge the Government to recognise the value that local communities place on those institutions. There is, perhaps, something rather nebulous about it, but they are seen as very important local institutions.
	It is remarkable how much money is raised by local communities for their community hospitals. On Sunday, I took part in the Great London Run to raise money for Wells hospital, which is now run as a charitable trust. That is an interesting development, and one that the former Secretary of State highlighted in Parliament last year when launching the White Paper. The idea of social enterprises of that sort running the local cottage hospital is an attractive proposition that ought to be explored further. If we close those local units, we lose the community involvement, the fundraising effort and the voluntary money that is going into our health service. We also lose a valuable local institution.
	The motion rightly draws attention to the importance of choice in maternity services. There is a sense at the moment that the funding of maternity services is unbalanced. We now have a remarkable situation in which 23 per cent. of births involve a caesarean section—

Anne Snelgrove: May I add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend the new Health Secretary on his flying start today? I also offer my best wishes to his new health team in their new roles. May I also add my tribute to the previous Health Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt)? I was her Parliamentary Private Secretary for the past 10 months. It was a privilege to serve her. I wish to say so in public, because I have said it to her in private. Her intellect, tenacity and dignity under fire were amazing. She will be remembered for having the courage to tackle the difficult issue of NHS deficits and pulling that off, which many Members on both sides of the House thought that she would not achieve. I hope that she enjoys her time on the Back Benches, but I hope that it will be a limited time.
	Access to health care has improved around the country, and in my Swindon constituency. Local plans are under way to improve it still further. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) has once again shown a fondness for picking isolated cases and testimonies, then manipulating and exaggerating them. For example, he mentioned the reorganisation of NHS Direct, and criticised the Government in a sweeping statement for reducing the number of call centres. In fact, that was a patient-led change. People's habits change, medicine changes and organisations change over time. NHS Direct was reorganised because more people were using the web service, and fewer people were using the telephone service. It was rightly reorganised because people's habits and demands had changed, and the hon. Gentleman should pay attention to that. His criticisms, both today and in previous Opposition day debates, are empty, and they do not add up to an holistic health policy.
	Fay Howard, a councillor and a nurse in my constituency, works at the Great Western hospital, which was built by Labour and opened in 2003. She is part of an NHS team treating more patients more quickly with better outcomes and higher patient satisfaction every year in Swindon. Apart from better access to GPs, accident and emergency services, and emergency care, Fay thinks that Labour's programme of delivering care at home is crucial, and she gave me powerful anecdotal evidence:
	"Some patients arrive with notes of visits and treatments they've been having at home which we didn't used to see. But the big units are still there when people need them, as well as NHS Direct, the walk in centre, the kids day treatment unit".
	Things have changed, because health care has changed and people's expectations have changed. My constituents expect the best: they also expect choice and appropriate treatment in the most appropriate place, whether that is in a hospital, a GP's surgery or at home.
	On a local level, front-line staff in Swindon are innovating to improve access, and I pay tribute to their hard work and dedication. The Government need to acknowledge that more: we must tell our NHS staff that they are doing a fantastic job, and listen to their views of the improvements and changes that we need to make. Swindon and Marlborough NHS trust is considering setting up a birthing centre to allow women with uncomplicated pregnancies to give birth in a homely environment, cared for by the midwifery team. That obviously improves access, but it also improves patient choice. Our sexual health clinic has developed a patient numbering system to protect anonymity, which encourages people to seek help. It also uses mobile text messaging for patients, which keeps the service anonymous so people return, which is crucial.
	The cardiology department launched a new service in May for heart patients who need angioplasties. It carries out procedures under local anaesthetic on 100 patients a year who would otherwise have to travel 50 miles to Bristol. Our radiography waiting times are among the lowest in the country. There is a filmless radiography department—it is all digital. If people transfer to Bristol, their X-ray can be e-mailed to the doctor, which means that there is no waiting. I am pleased that my local health service is listening to patient feedback. People wanted the audiology clinic to extend its opening times; it has done so, and likewise the booking centre. We have been helped by the Department of Health. Last month, it published progress on the 18-week target and everyone in my community was concerned that Swindon was low on the list. I am pleased that an action plan is in place, and that there will be regular consultations with MPs. I hope that the new health team will continue that excellent initiative, because we need to know how well our health service is doing.
	As well as acute care, primary care services have provided better access to patients in Swindon. Our walk-in clinic is a local success story, and constituents tell me that it is a great improvement on waiting to see a GP or going to accident and emergency. They have also praised increased pre-emptive care initiatives such as the falls clinic, which helps the elderly both to deal with falls and to prevent them at home, and the Alzheimer's clinic, which has become well known in Swindon under the leadership of Dr. Bullock. There is therefore increased access, choice and patient satisfaction. From next week, a new Government initiative—the telehealth initiative—goes live in Swindon. It will provide specialist monitoring equipment at home for people with respiratory disease, and is another measure that brings health care closer to home. It is a Labour initiative, and we are proud of it. It helps to explain why, throughout the country, we have 98 per cent. satisfaction rates among patients using the national health service —[ Interruption. ] The Opposition are heckling me, because they do not want to hear that 98 per cent. of people who use the health service, whether in a Tory, Liberal Democrat or Labour constituency, are satisfied with it. Patients love our local NHS, but they often tell me that the reports they read in the paper suggest that their experience is not the norm. Even though I am biased when it comes to Swindon; I can confirm from my time on the Government's health team that the NHS is good and improving all over the country, as I am sure we will hear from colleagues.
	We in Swindon remember the national headlines about lack of access: 60,000 general and acute beds were lost, waiting lists rose by 400,000, and the total number of hospitals went down under the Tories. They closed our local hospital—the Princess Alexandra—and let our other hospital go to rack and ruin. Then, as now, the Opposition had no proper strategy for increasing access. It has been my dubious pleasure to listen to every health Opposition day debate for the past 18 months. I have been proud to be on the front line since 2005. The Government will continue— [ Interruption. ]

Mary Creagh: I wish to speak briefly about the health care system in Wakefield, which presents a challenge, not least because we have to provide health care for two prisons. We have to provide mental health care, drugs and alcohol support and primary care in a women's prison, a young offender's institution and in Wakefield prison, which is high security. A remote electrocardiogram system is now in place in Wakefield prison so that prisoners who might be having a heart attack can be remotely assessed by hospital clinicians, thereby avoiding the security risks involved in transporting prisoners to and from hospital, such as opportunities for escape.
	According to the latest statistics, Wakefield has a positive first set of figures on the number of people waiting no more than 18 weeks to receive their treatment. At my local hospital, Pinderfields general hospital, 54 per cent. of patients received their treatment within 18 weeks. In a specialty such as gastroenterology, the proportion was more than 90 per cent. and in cardiology it was more than 70 per cent. Therefore, it is clear that targets are driving down waiting times, and it is vital that we keep them in order to improve patient care. Nationally, targets have resulted in 50,000 extra lives being saved from cancer and 150,000 lives saved from heart disease. That is also linked to our target to treat people in accident and emergency units within four hours. Anybody who had to wait in an accident and emergency unit 10 or 15 years ago with a sick child, a relative or a friend in pain, wondering when they were going to be seen—as many Members must have done—will welcome that maximum four-hour waiting target. It simply did not exist 10 years ago.
	I also wish to address accessibility to GP surgeries for people in wheelchairs and those with sight and mobility problems. Last year, I visited Kirkburton health centre in my constituency. It has a fantastic new centre, that was built under the LIFT—local improvement finance trust—scheme. It is fully compliant with disability and discrimination legislation, unlike some of the terraced housing that was all too prevalent under the Conservative years of NHS underfunding.
	In Wakefield we have had a problem with access to dental surgeries. I am delighted that that has been greatly relieved by the opening of a new dental practice in Queen street, which last year took on 8,000 new patients and is this year due to take on another 8,000 patients—a total of 16,000 people, most of them my constituents, who have never had access to dental care, or who have not had that for many years. I visited the surgery on Friday; goodie bags were being given to children, containing little toothbrushes that could stand up, little balloons that carried the message,
	"Twice a day for two minutes",
	and a special egg-timer—because we all know that it is not just about encouraging children to brush their teeth, but encouraging them to do so for a considerable period of time and many young children do not have the patience to do that. Wakefield is seeing its share of the £400 million national investment in dentistry.
	Like other areas, our local primary care trust has been underfunded. However, I am delighted that no PCT will be more than 3.7 per cent. below its target by the end of this financial year. There have been huge real-terms cash increases for our PCT, and in terms of our secondary and acute sector it was announced today—the celebrations are taking place—that Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust's £340 million private finance initiative to build new hospitals on the Pinderfield and Pontefract sites has been signed, sealed and delivered. I pay tribute to John Parkes, the former chief executive, Julia Squire, the current chief executive and Sir Hugh Sykes, the chair of the trust board, for reducing the in-year deficit of one of our hospitals from £30 million two years ago to £13 million this year. The projection is that balance will be achieved by October this year.
	I am also delighted that we have finally got £1 million transferred from the PCT to the acute hospitals to improve the hearing aid services for my constituents. My constituency is in an old industrial area where many people were involved in mining and there is a clear link between such heavy industry and drilling activities and hearing loss. As for the rhetoric about digital hearing aids, may I say as a former hearing aid user that people suffering hearing loss are not necessarily always best served by a digital hearing aid? Analogue hearing aids can provide required levels of volume and clarity without the long waits that are associated with the fitting of new digital hearing aids.
	To pick up on the points made by the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), there are health inequality issues in Wakefield. People in my constituency live on average one year less than the national average life expectancy and seven years less than those with the highest life expectancy in Britain. Some 25 per cent. of the adult population is obese and we need to look at placing a statutory duty on primary care trusts to reduce those types of health inequalities.
	In terms of access to health care, the new NHS choices website that was launched a couple of weeks ago provides patients with a great deal of information about what their local hospitals provide. For example, pregnant women in my constituency can look up Pontefract general infirmary and see vital information such as the number of women who knew their midwife in labour—in Pontefract it was 45 per cent. compared to an average of 22 per cent. They can also see if their local hospital has a neonatal intensive care unit or a special care baby unit, or a dedicated obstetric anaesthetist, which is related to my earlier intervention about waiting for an epidural. Crucially, women can discover whether, post-birth, they will have access to breastfeeding support—something that every mother would like to know. As we roll out choice and achieve greater transparency, we will see waiting lists and times coming down further.
	The Conservatives will the ends but not the means when it comes to health care access. They voted against the national insurance increase that saw a huge cash injection for the NHS. They talk about abolishing targets that have been crucial in driving down waiting lists and tackling the scourge of hospital-acquired infections. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) is in his place, although he did not mention his Cornerstone document, although some of the case studies that he mentioned came from it. He wants people to take out health insurance to cover all their family's medical expenses. That would be
	"set at a level to cover all your family's medical expenses greater than 5 per cent. of your family's income."
	That challenging new system would
	"cover all serious medical conditions which could require significant costs."
	But the real driver of the document is in this sentence:
	"An added bonus of this shift in policy would be a massive cut in taxation without penalising public services."
	The second part of that sentence is highly debatable. As in so many instances, the Conservatives offer warm words, but lying beneath them is cold comfort for families and patients in my constituency. We need to put our money where our mouth is, invest in modern facilities that people deserve and ensure that our NHS is safe as it approaches its 60th birthday and safe for the next 60 years.

Tony Baldry: Geography is not convenient: the Horton general hospital in my constituency serves a large part of north and west Oxfordshire, south Warwickshire and south Northamptonshire. It has been a general hospital for more than 100 years, but it is now facing the prospect of a serious downgrading of hospital services, including the removal of 24/7 paediatric care.
	That level of paediatric care at Horton came about because of the death of a child. In 1974, Barbara Castle, then Secretary of State for Health, ordered an independent public inquiry, which ruled that there should be 24/7 paediatric care at the Horton. As a consequence of losing that care, we have the prospect of losing the special care baby unit and consultant-led obstetric and midwife maternity services.
	When the Oxford Radcliffe NHS trust made those proposals, 86 GPs made a joint statement saying that they were unsafe and inhumane. As a consequence, the trust took its proposals off the table and set up two clinical working groups, which—slightly bizarrely—met and worked in secret. Many of us thought that their purpose was to wear down GP opposition to the proposals. Indeed, several GPs now say that while they are very unhappy about what is proposed, they consider it to be—and we should take note of this sentence's construction—the least worst option. I do not want an NHS in my constituency that is the least worst option. Nor do I believe that Ministers want that.
	The trust also set up a stakeholders' group, with many members, including Labour councillors Surinder Dhesi, George Parish and Dr. Peter Fisher, who for many years was a consultant physician at the Horton and a Labour county councillor. The group has published a unanimous report, a bit like a Select Committee report, in which it expresses concerns. It says that
	"health services must be designed in the best interests of patients and education and training should support that objective. Instead in Oxfordshire and other parts of England educational concerns are leading decisions about the pattern of healthcare with patient needs coming second. The position in maternity services is particularly acute as we understand that many more units across the country may be threatened by these changes to medical education and working hours."
	The group request that the trust
	"raise this matter at a national level".
	I am glad that I have the opportunity to do so in the House today.
	The group's document also states that
	"instead of being asked to consider a positive vision for the future we have found ourselves being asked to choose between the lesser of two evils—on the one hand there are the clinical risks inherent in the current service arrangements; on the other there are the proposals that by addressing the clinical risk will worsen access to services for local people. Both 'evils' are being driven by national policy changes which should be challenged...None of us believe that they"—
	the changes—
	"are desirable."
	I have two questions for Ministers. First, how are any of us to explain to people that a substantial downgrading of NHS services is an improvement? I would welcome any Minister who wished to come to Banbury for a rational debate—this is not a partisan issue. As I say, the chair of the "Keep the Horton General" campaign is a Labour district councillor and the campaign has broad support across the community. How can we explain that we are going back to pre-Barbara Castle days and that that is in some way an improvement?
	My second question is what will Ministers do to protect smaller general hospitals, or are they content to see them downgraded? The stakeholder group concluded:
	"The proposals that the clinical working groups have put forward may be a 'least worst' scenario but they represent a significant downgrading of access to services and a worsening of choice for women and children in the Banbury area."
	I cannot imagine that Ministers or anyone want to see a downgrading of access to the NHS for women and children.
	Why Ministers should be concerned is because the Oxford Radcliffe trust seemed to suggest that the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists suggested that a maternity unit is not viable unless it had 2,500 births a year. The group points out that the college's document, "Safer Childbirth: Minimum Standards for Service Provision and Care in Labour", published in November 2006, actually says that units such as the Horton with fewer than 2,500 births should
	"continually review staffing to ensure it is adequate based on local needs".
	The group comments:
	"This does not seem to be saying that 2,500 is the minimum figure for births in an obstetric-led unit. Rather it seems to suggest that fewer hours consultant support would be required for this number of babies and that staffing levels should be determined locally."
	I would hope that Ministers would feel able to try to work out how health care provision in smaller general hospitals can be protected.
	Sir Ian Kennedy, the chairman of the Healthcare Commission, in a recent speech, observed that
	"it is terribly important that services and particularly maternity services, in the light of recent proposals from government and professional groups, keep their eye on the ball of safety as they go through the forthcoming period of change and development."
	I do not believe that making expectant mothers travel 26 miles, or more than an hour, to Oxford will necessarily enhance safety.
	So I hope that Ministers will hear what I have said and accept that it was not intended to be a partisan speech. Instead, I was making a genuine plea that they get a grip on what is happening in the NHS. They need to find ways to protect the services provided by smaller general hospitals, because people do not accept that the substantial downgrading of services in NHS hospitals is a way to improve the health service.

Quentin Davies: I wholeheartedly agree with a number of the ideas that have been thrown around this afternoon. First, it would be excellent to have elections to the boards of NHS hospital trusts, and the introduction of such elections would be thoroughly consistent with the spirit of the Prime Minister's announcement this afternoon.
	Secondly, I very much agree with what has been said about macular degeneration. It is a real problem, and the fact that some PCTs ration treatments for it is a disgrace. We are talking not about a condition that causes merely minor discomfort but about an illness that affects a person's sight—a faculty that is desperately important to everyone. Under no circumstances should PCTs try to save money in that way; indeed, almost any other health programme would provide a better vehicle for saving money.
	We have very little time, so I shall make only two, connected points. First, there has obviously been the most astonishing turnaround in the NHS over recent years. It would be churlish and an example of bad faith to deny that—

Quentin Davies: No, there is no time. I am sorry, but the hon. Gentleman must understand that.
	The figures are amazing. There is no doubt that a lot of credit for that attaches to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), and I am very glad that my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) said what she did in that respect. It does not make much sense to talk about waiting lists: having 1.2 million people, say, wait a month for some form of elective would be reasonable, in fact desirable, but it would be totally unacceptable to have 100,000 waiting for a year.
	Instead, we must talk about average and maximum waiting times, They have been falling dramatically, and I hope that we will achieve the 18-week target this year. In addition, it is remarkable and very gratifying that we have achieved the target of ensuring that urgent cancer cases go from identification of symptoms and diagnosis to treatment in a maximum of two weeks. That is an absolutely vital achievement.
	My second, related point, is that we would not have secured those improvements without targets. There is an enormous amount of confusion among my former hon. Friends in the Opposition about that. Indeed, it may be worse that confusion—perhaps there is an element of opportunism in their approach. At present, the Government are having a row with the health service unions, so Opposition Members ask themselves why they should not curry some short-term favour with the unions by promising them something. It does not matter how irresponsible the promise might be, so why not promise to get rid of targets in the NHS?
	I am sorry to voice such suspicions, but that is the pattern of the Opposition's behaviour over the past few months. It is deeply depressing, and needs to be exposed. Perhaps my exposure of their approach will make my former colleagues on the other side of the House think twice before they go in for a kind of politics that I deplore.

Graham Stuart: It is interesting to find myself following the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), especially given that, in his election address of just two years ago, he said:
	"The Health Service is in many ways worse. Average hospital waiting times (the key measure) have increased from 90 to 95 days and deaths from diseases caught in hospital have more than doubled. The GP service has been run down. NHS dentistry has all but disappeared."
	The hon. Gentleman's new friends may be interested to hear all that, but I and my hon. Friend know that personal slights and slighted vanity count for more with him than does fighting for the NHS. That is the central priority of the Conservative party, under its current excellent leadership.

Graham Stuart: I think that we have dealt with the hon. Gentleman fully.
	Like many other hon. Members I should like to welcome the new health ministerial team. Before today, I thought that the new Health Secretary and his Ministers would offer new hope to the Department—at least compared with their predecessors, who left NHS staff and patients both demoralised and discontented. I hope that Ministers will learn from that history and perhaps show greater humility, given the recent record, than the Secretary of State showed today. He said that the former Secretary of State carried more political nous or ability than I had in the end of my finger. That is about my assessment; I think that she has got more ability than I have in the end of my small finger.
	The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) said that we needed targets. She is absolutely wedded to targets. I am glad to say that the Secretary of State has taken a lesson from the consistent, hard-working and excellent Conservative Front-Bench team on the need to get rid of targets and has said that he will move away from targets. The hon. Member for Wakefield may resist that, but I am glad that there was one bright spark in the speech of the new Secretary of State.
	In the few minutes that I have, I want to talk about community hospitals. When I came to this place, I found that hon. Members across the House had problems with community hospitals. I see some of them here this evening on the Labour Benches. Vital services were threatened with cuts or closure, so in November 2005 I formed community hospitals acting nationally together—CHANT—a cross-party group supported by Liberal Democrat, Labour, Conservative and Independent Members and patrons from both Houses of Parliament. I am not sure whether the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford is a supporter or not. CHANT has fought to raise the issue of community hospitals in this House. We were delighted by the Government's White Paper, which suggested that at last community hospitals were going to be saved.
	When CHANT was established in November 2005, about 80 community hospitals were threatened with cuts or closure. That number, according to the Community Hospitals Association, is now more than 166. Across the country, especially in rural communities, we have seen services cut. In my local area, we have seen the 24-hour minor injuries unit service at Withernsea hospital cut to day times only. We have seen constant battles by the whole community, on a cross-party basis, as my hon. Friends, who have not been seeking to make partisan points, have pointed out. Proposals were put forward at one stage to close every bed in Hornsea cottage hospital on some spurious urgency grounds. That had to be resisted by the threat of going to court, which led to the trust backing down.
	Then the primary care trust came forward with proposals that would have seen every NHS bed closed in my constituency—beds in Withernsea, which is a highly deprived, isolated community, Hornsea and Beverley as well as Driffield. The plan was that the only NHS beds to replace those closed beds would be in Goole and Bridlington—a four-hour round trip. Who knows how long it would take by public transport for the typically elderly patient and their spouse if they had to get to those hospitals? The community came together as one. The one benefit of the consultation was the way in which it brought the community together. They were united in opposition to the plan, as people have been in so many other parts of the country.
	In fact, 3,500 submissions were made to the PCT. It was overwhelmed and had to delay its response. Tens of thousands of people signed petitions. I am pleased to say that every Member of Parliament in the East Riding of Yorkshire and the leaders of the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, the Independents and the Conservatives on East Riding of Yorkshire council jointly signed a letter to the PCT board saying that it must stop the attack on vital services. I am pleased to relate that that did have an impact, such was the opposition. The trust has recognised the need to maintain beds in Beverley, which is a major step forward, and Withernsea. It has not saved any beds in Hornsea, although I hope still that there will be an opportunity for us to keep some beds in what I believe is the largest town in England that does not have an A road to it. It has B roads, which are all too often blocked by traffic in the summer. Local people need local services in that sparsely populated rural community. They should not be judged on the same basis as a unit in the centre of a city.
	I congratulate the whole community, the newspapers, and the television stations. The  Hull Daily Mail, the  Holderness Gazette and the  Beverley Guardian worked on the campaign. Political parties, voluntary groups and others came together and fought the decision, and the PCT was made to listen. However, we are losing beds in Hornsea and there is a pattern of such closures across the country. I hope that the new ministerial team will look again at the White Paper and send out messages from the centre that community hospitals will be supported.
	There has been chaos in the way in which the Department has responded. Fortunately, there was a major effort in the House to put pressure on Ministers in the previous Administration. There was a response last summer from the previous Secretary of State; she announced £750 million of capital funding for community hospitals. That was supposed to be a five-year programme. Perhaps I may ask the new Minister of State to investigate the programme. My PCT was told by the strategic health authority with only a few weeks' notice that it had to pull forward and get its bids in by the end of June, now postponed to the end of July. Yet it was supposed to be a five-year programme with full consultation. I ask the Minister to look again at community hospitals and ensure that the vision laid out in the White Paper, which had support across the House, can be delivered on the ground. Too often, Government rhetoric has not been matched by the reality that local constituents have had to put up with.

Richard Taylor: I have four minutes to bring to the attention of the new Ministers, whom I welcome, some practical suggestions. I have the amazing opportunity to bring together what the Secretary of State and the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) said. The Secretary of State said that each patient must have a clear path to follow. The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire pointed out the confusion about the path to follow for access to emergency care. That is what I want to talk about.
	Ordinary patients have at least eight options for access to emergency care. They can dial 999; they can walk into an A and E department, a minor injuries unit or a walk-in centre; they can contact their GP if it is during the third of the week when he or she is on duty; they can telephone the GP out-of-hours service; they can phone NHS Direct, or they can drop into a primary care out-of-hours centre. People are confused. Emergency access has to be clarified and it is easy to clarify it. There must be just two options—go to the A and E if there happens to be one, or use a single telephone number.
	If only the telephone triage service could be rationalised so that there was one number for everyone to phone across the country and a standardised triage system at the end of the phone, one would sort out the problems of access to emergency care in a moment. The huge point is that the Department of Health has the means to do that. I urge the Minister to look at NHS pathways, which has defined exactly the standard questionnaire that can sort out anybody. I tested it on a small boy who sadly died in my constituency as a result of inadequate triage. After about the fourth question, NHS pathways would have picked up the fact that the little boy needed to be admitted to hospital. I plead with Ministers to look at NHS pathways. It is being piloted in the north-east by the ambulance service there, which is to report in September 2007. It is being piloted in Croydon by the out-of-hours service, which is also to report in September 2007. The results are expected to show tremendous success and benefit.
	I believe that NHS Direct should be limited to giving advice to patients about illnesses, and should not give advice on access to emergency care. Ministers should look at NHS pathways seriously to see why it cannot be rolled out to cover the whole country. It would have huge benefits, solve the problems with NHS Direct, and release nurses to nurse because the triage is so organised that it can be done by trained lay people. I urge the Minister to make it a high priority to create only two options for emergency care—A and E or a single phone number connected to NHS pathways.

Stephen O'Brien: I welcome the Minister of State, Department of Health, the hon. Member for Exeter (Mr. Bradshaw), to his new responsibilities and I look forward to our exchanges at the Dispatch Box. I am sure that he will soon realise that nothing is more important to our constituents than their security and their health, so, conscious of the values of the doctors' pledge—the Hippocratic oath—it is poignant that we are meeting as we learn of the doctor arrested in Brisbane, Australia, who had worked in a hospital in my home and constituency county, treating my constituents and those in neighbouring constituencies.
	We have had a good, wide-ranging debate, throughout which Conservative Members have defended the NHS from the ravages and ramifications of the Government's poor planning and the even worse implementation of their top-down targets. The Secretary of State, who has just returned to the Chamber, had a prize opportunity to steal our clothes, but instead he dug in and defended everything done by his predecessor, who of course paid the ultimate political price for just that.
	As we have said before, we remain concerned that the Government's basis for their NHS policy decisions is a desperate scrabble for cash rather than a focus on the health outcomes for the people of our country. The hard-working staff of the NHS, to whom we all pay tribute, deserve far greater support than they are receiving from the Government, so we have presented the new Prime Minister's team with a copy of our NHS autonomy and accountability white paper. Although the Prime Minister seemed to distance himself from the idea of taking politics out of the NHS in the closing days of his non-campaign, at the weekend he told the  News of the World that he would be pursuing our policy. Clearly, he has found "all the talents" for NHS policy in the Conservative white paper.
	Ultimately, whatever the specific issues we have debated today, the future of fair access to our NHS services lies in the autonomy of the NHS to make decisions based on clinical, not political, criteria and its accountability to the House and to the public and patients who use it every day. The case was made fairly and forcefully by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley), supported by an excellent and powerful speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone). In addition, I pray in aid the following quotation:
	"The NHS was the creation of all three parties. Its fundamental principles have never been under greater threat."
	Those words appeared recently on the website of none other than the hon. Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies).
	My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition has constantly confirmed our commitment that the NHS is our No. 1 priority, and that under an incoming Conservative Government it will continue to be a public service free at the point of need, with access based on need, not on ability to pay. I hope that even at this late hour the Government will support that part of our motion—interestingly, their amendment would delete that crucial overriding principle and value without repeating it or replacing it with words of their own. What do they mean by that?
	Last December, the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury undertook the Government's consultation on the core principles of the NHS, which we have committed to enshrining in legislation. In that consultation, the Government omitted the principle that
	"public funds for healthcare will be devoted solely to NHS patients".
	What do they mean by that? Perhaps the new Minister will tell us whether he still wants to get rid of that central pillar of the NHS.
	Amidst the various disasters that befell the NHS on the watch of the right hon. Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt), the negotiation of the new GP contract will be remembered as one of her biggest political tombstones. The cost was over £250 million more than the Government had originally intended for a service that had been slated by the National Audit Office— [ Interruption. ] I am happy to take all bids for admission of failure.
	What does the Minister intend to do about those costs? As the motion makes clear, our recommendation is that practice-based commissioning be developed to provide greater incentives for the integration of GP services with out-of-hours care. I hope that the Minister will not be tempted to repeat the point that 96 per cent. of practices have taken up practice-based commissioning. As I have discovered through parliamentary questions, his Department counts only GP practices that take up component 1 of the PBC incentive payment, which is, in effect, free money: 95p per registered patient if the practice submits a plan on how it intends to deliver direct enhanced services. The practice receives that money whether or not it delivers on the plan. Component 2 of the payment is made available when it actually delivers, so it is no wonder that I was not surprised to discover that information about the take-up of PBC is collected only at primary care trust level. Will the Minister tell us what percentage of GP practices have taken up component 2?
	We also recommend the use of PBC to integrate urgent care. Will the Minister give us the timetable for publication of the urgent care strategy? The White Paper, "Our health, our care, our say" promised:
	"During 2006 we will develop an urgent care strategy for the NHS."
	However, we are halfway through 2007 and all we have from Ministers is a commitment to publish "in due course". We also await the review of walk-in centres and the patient access survey results. As regards the former, a year ago last month, according to the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis)—who has not returned to the Chamber:
	"The matters are still under consideration."—[ Official Report, 13 June 2006; Vol. 447, c. 1161W.]
	What is the hold-up? Perhaps the answer is in the new Minister's in-tray, or walk-in tray, or his kick-it-into-the-long-grass tray. Who knows?
	My hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr. Stuart), who has been a tireless campaigner on behalf of community hospitals, made a justifiably impassioned late contribution on the subject. Since 1999, more than 3,000 community hospital beds have been lost; 27 hospitals have experienced closures and 139 are under threat. Only £50 million of the £750 million community fund budget announced last summer has actually been allocated to community hospitals, with a further £50 million to polyclinics. Moreover, the Government have dropped their 2005 election manifesto pledge to build or refurbish 50 community hospitals. When will the Minister start defending community hospitals, which are the key to delivering care closer to home?
	We have heard from Members on both sides of the House who face the threat of closure of their local accident and emergency departments. In April, when questioned by my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire, the former Secretary of State refused to say whether she endorsed or rejected the Department of Health guidance on the subject. Will the new Minister tell us what he thinks? I caution him that if he accepts the Department's guidance
	"that to be viable, a full A&E Department in the future would need to be supported by a catchment population of between 450,000 and 500,000 people"—
	a claim for which we have seen no evidence, but which is being prayed in aid by strategic health authorities hoping to close A and E departments—he will be condemning 92 of England's 204 A and E departments to closure, as was highlighted in an intervention about Haywards Heath by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames).
	Mothers-to-be in England might take heart from the elevation under the new regime of Government campaigners for maternity services. The new Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is protesting against the closure of maternity services at Hope hospital in Salford. The new Home Secretary is protesting against closures at the Alexandra hospital in Redditch. Mothers-to-be will be pleased to hear that the Under-Secretary of State for Health, who is still not in the Chamber, and who protested against the closure of maternity services at Fairfield hospital in Bury, is the only Health Minister from the previous line-up to keep his job.
	Unfortunately, what the hon. Gentleman does in his constituency seems to bear no relation to the policies he signs off at Westminster. We have repeatedly asked for clinical evidence for reconfigurations of maternity services. The report failed to provide it and the hon. Gentleman confirmed that the necessary research will not be concluded until 31 August 2009, yet the mad march of threatened closures continues—such as the closure at Horton, as has been repeatedly and ably pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry). Sixty per cent. of those services are operated by providers that finished the 2005-06 financial year in deficit, and 65 per cent. of them are situated in parliamentary constituencies held by Opposition MPs.
	It is depressing that yet again the choose-and-book statistics have been run out. As long as a person has made just one phone call, even though it is completely useless, it is counted in the 85 per cent. "successful use" figure.
	In the spirit of consensus building so beloved of the new Prime Minister, we have today taken a constructive approach and offered a positive way forward, but neither in their motion or in the debate have the Government attempted to answer any of our points. Perhaps the Minister, who is fresh from ducking the issues on badgers to control the spread of bovine TB, can set up a new example of Government transparency when he speaks. Spending is not the same as delivering.
	Surely now that the clunking fist of the ex-Chancellor has grasped power, the Government should recognise that there is a large elephant in the room, which is, as they say in the motion, their suggestion that the staff and the medical profession have worked hard to deliver the Government's targets. No—they have worked hard to deliver better patient care and they have done so by working not necessarily with and for the Government, but often despite the Government who have set the top-down targets. That is why we need a new freedom of access and free access that is equitable across the country. I ask my hon. Friends on the Opposition Benches and perhaps some good-thinking friends on the Government side to support the motion.

Ben Bradshaw: This has been a mainly good debate and many important points have been raised. I acknowledge the warm welcome that Members on both sides have given to the new team on the Government Front Bench.
	The health service we inherited in 1997 was starved of essential funding. Every winter heralded a new crisis, cancer death rates were going up, waiting lists topped 1 million, there was a shortage of beds, patients were left on trolleys in A and E for hours and half of all hospital buildings had been built before 1948. Ten years on, the position is transformed thanks to greater investment, difficult but necessary system reform and, above all, the tremendous work of those who work in the NHS.
	As recent successive independent surveys have shown, patient appreciation of the health service is at record levels. The Healthcare Commission survey, in line with previous years, showed that more than nine in 10 people rate their care as excellent, very good or good. The recent Commonwealth Fund survey of international rankings looked at the health services of the UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United States against health system indicators of quality, equity, healthy lives, access and efficiency and it placed the UK first, an increase of two places since 2006.

Ben Bradshaw: Certainly not. I very much regret that not all Back Benchers were able to contribute to the debate because the Opposition went on for too long. I will not give way in the 10 minutes that I have left to respond to the very important points that Back Benchers have made.
	The Government accept that the transition that we have put through since 1997 has been delivered at some cost to staff engagement and some measure of public confidence. Those who use the NHS testify in ever-greater numbers to its excellent treatment and improved resources, but the public as a whole are not yet persuaded. Deficits in some health trusts place unwanted additional strain on hard-working NHS staff.
	I now come to some of the points that have been made in the debate. The hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) was absolutely right when he said that health inequalities remain a major challenge. Access to GPs, for example, differs widely even within regions of the country. In the north-east, there are 133 per 100,000 of population in Northumberland compared with 25 per 100,000 in neighbouring Redcar and Cleveland. He is right to say that we have more to do on that, and we are doing so through the fairness in primary care procurement. We have been working with the 30 primary care trusts with the fewest GPs for their populations and contracts with new providers should improve access to services for thousands of people living in those areas. Advertisements for the initial four—Hartlepool, Nottinghamshire County Teaching, County Durham and Yarmouth and Waveney—were placed in April. Advertisements for a further six PCTs were published for Ashton, Leigh and Wigan, Bolton, East Lancashire, Luton Teaching, Manchester and Trafford.
	The hon. Gentleman is also right to point to the problems that we still face in audiology. We acknowledge that waits for hearing aids are still too long and we published a framework for tackling the problem in May. The Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis), will publish the Government's response to the Health Committee's recent report shortly.
	I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that there will be no change in the Government's approach to independent sector treatment centres, and he is also right to say that challenges remain in orthodontics. As he will know, the old system led to huge variations in the provision of orthodontic services, because orthodontists could decide for themselves where to set up practice and how much work to do for the NHS. Last year's reforms will address that issue, but I have to point out that the NHS spends more on orthodontic services per head of population than any other state-funded system in the world.
	The hon. Member for Romsey (Sandra Gidley) said that she thought that the provision of dentistry was getting worse. That is not the case. NHS dentistry is expanding nationally. PCTs are now commissioning more dental services than the year before the reforms, and in March 2007 there were more than 21,000 dentists on NHS lists, an increase of 4,000 since 1997.
	Most of the points made by Conservative Members seemed to focus on the configuration of hospital services, and community hospitals and community services in particular. The configuration of hospital services must be a matter for the local national health service. We do not believe that it is central Government's role to micro-manage every local health economy. As my hon. Friends the Members for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) and for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) and my new hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies), in an excellent contribution, made absolutely clear, reconfiguration in their constituencies has led to considerable benefits in terms of health service provision.
	As the hon. Member for North Norfolk pointed out, the implications of the Conservative party's policy is more closures of community hospitals not being decided at local level but being decided by a national quango. That is not the route that we intend to go down. Far from closing hospitals, this Government have delivered the biggest hospital building programme ever, with 109 new hospitals open or under construction since 1997. The reconfigurations are taking place because doctors are telling us that specialist care needs to be concentrated in centres of excellence so that clinicians with the right expertise, experience and equipment can treat the sickest patients safely and conveniently.
	Conservative Members also asked what the Government's approach to targets would be and how many targets we have got rid of. My information is that targets have reduced in number over the past three strategic reviews from 108 to 20. The 18-week wait is the only remaining target when it comes to access.
	We were presented with a paper by the official Opposition and, as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said, we will take a look at it. On the face of it, the things that they are proposing are either already under way or we do not believe that they are necessary to achieve the improvements that we all want. As the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Bone) acknowledged in the Cornerstone paper, a large bulk of the Conservative party want private health insurance to pay for tax cuts.
	As we move to the next phase of the NHS transformation, we agree that there should be much greater focus not on top-down reforms, but on stimulating change among patients and practitioners. The policy framework that we set out will be right only if the views of staff and patients are properly incorporated. A modern NHS must move from a public sector monopoly to a truly patient-led public service. The previous ministerial team, to whom I also pay tribute, took significant steps towards creating an independent, self-improving NHS, steadily removing powers from the hands of politicians and transferring it to clinicians. Increased transparency and independence have brought undoubted improvements, but it has also had a short-term effect on confidence. However, we were right to introduce those changes.
	Patients need staff to take the time to explain the condition and treatment options and citizens need to know what is going on and to be properly involved in collective decisions. We introduced national targets to eradicate the unacceptably long waiting lists and, without those targets, the NHS would not have seen the transformation of services that I described earlier. But the treatment needed for the NHS then, when the whole system was in intensive care, is not the same as the treatment it needs now. We are determined to move away from targets as we transform the NHS from a top-down bureaucracy to a bottom-up, self-improving organisation with power in the hands of patients, their advocates and, crucially, GPs and others in primary care and the staff.
	Waiting lists and waiting times are at record low levels. The Government are on course to hit next year their 18-week target for the waiting time from GP referral to treatment. We have seen huge falls in deaths from heart disease and cancer. There are 80,000 more nurses and 35,000 more doctors, and there is better pay for our brilliant NHS staff. There are more than 100 new hospitals. That is what the Labour Government meant when we promised to save the NHS after 18 years of Tory neglect. Of course we must learn from mistakes and listen to our critics and, in particular, to those who work o n the front line, but our overriding principle must be what is in the best interests of patients. It is absurd to deny that our health service is in immeasurably better shape than it was 10 years ago. Under this Labour Government, it will continue to get better.

Chris Grayling: I beg to move,
	That this House notes the loss of public trust in the UK pension system caused by the continuing £5 billion per year stealth tax raid on pension funds, the winding up of 60,000 occupational pension schemes since 1997, the closure of two-thirds of remaining final salary pension schemes to new members and the acceleration of closures to new accruals by existing members; further notes the loss by 125,000 workers whose pension schemes have failed of some or all of their pensions and the poor performance of the Financial Assistance Scheme in supporting them and the growing concern about the disparity between pension expectations in the public and private sectors as well as the size of the unfunded public sector occupational pension liabilities faced by future taxpayers; and calls on the new Prime Minister to acknowledge his role in the pensions crisis and to take personal responsibility for the urgent task of restoring to millions of hard-working families the confidence to save for retirement.
	Before we get to the meat of the debate, may I congratulate the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on his appointment? I look forward to debating with him over the next few months. I hope that our relationship will be constructive, as well as combative, as is the way with these things. In the past few days, and indeed in the House this afternoon, we have heard the first of what I am sure will be a blizzard of initiatives from the new Prime Minister, but so far almost everything that we have heard has been about the process of government. That is all well and good, but what the people of this country are really looking for is solutions to the real problems that we face, and in particular to the problems that the Government and the Prime Minister have created in the past 10 years.
	For the past three hours, we have heard about the way in which decisions made by the Prime Minister have let down our health service, its patients and the people who work in it. I want to address what is probably the Prime Minister's other big failing: the way in which he has presided over the disasters in Britain's pension system. It is noticeable that since Tony Blair announced his retirement at the end of April, we have heard a lot of talk from the new Prime Minister about how he will tackle problems such as the out-of-hours crisis in the national health service, even though he and his colleagues caused that crisis through their mishandling of the issue two years ago. I notice that there is one issue on which he has been as quiet as a church mouse, and on which there has been not a word. It is the issue on which, more than any other, the problems that this Government have created lie right at the Prime Minister's door—our pensions crisis, not entirely made in No. 11 Downing street, but with the Prime Minister's fingerprints all over the scene of the crime.
	So how can the new occupant of No. 10 Downing street be the change that he claims to be, when he has been so closely involved in one of the great failures of the past decade? Nowhere is that need for change greater than in the delivery of pensions policy, and nowhere will it be more difficult for the new Prime Minister to deliver, as he is the architect of the policies over the past 10 years that have brought us to the position that we are in today.

Chris Grayling: It is funny how these things work out. Before Labour Members leap to their feet in complaint, I was about to acknowledge that many of the challenges facing our pensions system are far outside the control of Governments, not least increasing life expectancy and tightened global investment returns, and I do not pretend that every decision taken by every past Government, Conservative or Labour, has been the right one.

John Butterfill: On contributions holidays, they certainly were introduced under the last Conservative Government, at a time when the stock market was roaring ahead and when Revenue rules permitted them, otherwise pension funds would have been overfunded on Revenue rules. The difference is that the pensions holidays were continued under the present Government at a time when the stock market was collapsing, and have been continued to this day by the Government. The parliamentary contributory pension fund, which I have the honour to chair, would be in surplus today if it had not been for the £50 million that the Government have failed to put into it.

Chris Grayling: My hon. Friend makes a good point. One of the great ironies is that the then shadow Chancellor, who subsequently became the Chancellor and is now the Prime Minister, criticised the last Conservative Government when he was in opposition, came into office at a more difficult time for pension funds and took policy decisions that undermined them fundamentally, so my hon. Friend is right to raise those concerns.
	The measure of a Government is how they respond to external challenges. On pensions, the Government have so far failed. It remains the case that, in the words—if he will forgive me for quoting him—of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field), the Labour Government's first Minister for Welfare Reform back in 1997:
	"When Labour came to office we had one of the strongest pension provisions in Europe and now probably we have some of the weakest."
	That does not mean that every decision that was taken before 1997 was right, but it does mean that in his judgment the system in 1997 was in reasonably robust shape.

Chris Grayling: The right hon. Gentleman is very experienced in these matters and he levels a serious criticism of decisions taken in the past. He heard my remarks. I do not claim that every decision taken before 1997 was the right one. None the less, it is his own case that in 1997 the system was in pretty good shape. That clearly was not the case four or five years later. As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill), one of the supreme ironies is that the same man who was shadow Chancellor before 1997 claimed that the last Conservative Government had undermined pension schemes, and claimed that some of the decisions that were taken were flawed, then came into government and took steps that helped wreck that reasonably robust pensions system.

David Taylor: This is all pretty scintillating stuff. The motion, like all Conservative pensions motions, refers to the abolition of dividend tax credit, as if that were some central act that has caused particular difficulties, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that in the 18 years of the Conservative Government, successive Conservative Chancellors cut the dividend tax credit on five separate occasions? Can he confirm that and thereby lift the tone of his speech, which has so enthused his party that all but two Members, it should be noted, feel that he has nothing new to offer?

Chris Grayling: The hon. Gentleman will know from his knowledge of history that many of the changes to the dividend tax credit came as part of reductions in corporation tax, part of the tax-cutting policies of the last Conservative Government. Let me challenge him. He implies that that was not an issue. Let me quote to him the words of the Prime Minister's former pension adviser, who said:
	"The Chancellor will go down in history as the one who destroyed our pensions system."
	The president of the National Association of Pension Funds said:
	"This was the biggest attack on pensions in living memory. Even Robert Maxwell only took £450 million."
	In the very experienced judgment of the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, in 1997 the pensions system was in pretty good shape, and subsequently it clearly was not.

Chris Grayling: In a moment, but let me set out for the hon. Gentleman some of the current issues. The Government have estimated that 7 million people are not saving enough for retirement. The household savings ratio has hit a record low—2.1 per cent.—under the Government. Tens of thousands of occupational pension schemes have closed, 125,000 people have been left high and dry without the pensions that they saved for or the retirements that they planned for, and all the while, as private sector occupational pensions collapsed, the unfunded cost of meeting public sector occupational pension commitments has soared.

Paul Truswell: Perhaps I can ask a question on the hon. Gentleman's speech. He is almost on the verge of being remarkably frank and admitting that his predecessors in government had form in their impact on pension policy. Will he list the offences that he would like to have taken into consideration? Is it the SERPS scandal, the removal of the earnings link, the promotion of state pension opt-outs, the orgy of pension mis-selling, the ineffectual Pensions Act 1995, or as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) said, the encouragement of pensions holidays?

Chris Grayling: That was an interestingly well read list. The most experienced analysis of the state of Britain's pension system from any member of the Government comes from the right hon. Member for Birkenhead, who is more experienced in this area than any member of the Front-Bench team. His judgment is that in 1997 our pensions system was in pretty good shape, so I will take no lessons from the Government about what happened before 1997, as they have done lasting damage to our pensions system since 1997. They have created a crisis of confidence in pension saving that must be addressed as a matter of urgency. It is one of the great challenges facing the Government.
	We have a new Prime Minister, a new Secretary of State and a new Minister with responsibility for pensions, but from the new Prime Minister not even a hint that pensions are among his priorities, or that he feels the need to use his new position to right the wrongs of his time as Chancellor. So I make no apology for raising the issue at the earliest opportunity. The truth is that pensions policy has been run from the Treasury since 1997. The new Prime Minister has to take personal responsibility for the decisions that have been made, and must give a personal lead in addressing the crisis that many pensioners and future pensioners face.
	As hon. Members know from the debates on the Pensions Bill, we have constantly sought to engage the Government in constructive dialogue about providing solutions to the problems in our pension system. I wait with interest to see how the Government respond to the amendments passed in the other place. My message to the Secretary of State is that we will continue to look constructively at proposals to continue the repair and mend job that has to be done to our pensions system. I hope that in return he will engage constructively with the Opposition on this most long-term of issues. Only by finding lasting solutions and building political consensus around them can public confidence in our pensions system be restored. But that will not change the failings of the past from a Prime Minister trying to pretend that he somehow just was not around for the first 10 years of this Government.

Chris Grayling: Let me make some progress and then I will give way.
	We should not forget that before the Prime Minister took office, as Chancellor he promised:
	"I can give this pledge—fairness to the pensioners under Labour".
	The very next year he imposed the ultimate stealth tax on pension funds, abolishing the tax credits on dividends, costing occupational pension schemes billions of pounds—an estimated £5 billion a year. Cumulatively, about £120 billion was wiped off the capital value of today's funds.
	Then we had the unedifying sight of the Prime Minister, who has come to office claiming that he believes in transparency and openness—what a laugh that is—spending two years trying to prevent  The Times from gaining access to the documents that proved that he knew all along about the damage that his policies would do. We know from the documents—I have copies here tonight—that Treasury officials advised the Chancellor that the tax change would cause a massive shortfall in pension funds. The advisers concluded:
	"We agree that abolishing pension tax credits would make a big hole in pension scheme finances...the loss of tax credits would cost pension providers about £4 billion a year, growing over time with future dividends".
	They also concluded that poorer pensioners would be hit hardest:
	"The change would therefore lead to a reduction in pension benefits to the lower paid...Quite clearly any loss of pension could be difficult for someone with a small income to cope with."
	The Prime Minister seems to have it in for the low paid at the moment, because it is they who will end up paying the price for the decisions taken in this year's Budget—the tax increases that fall disproportionately on the low paid. I will give way to the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) if he will tell me whether he supports the policy of targeting the low paid.

Tom Levitt: The hon. Gentleman is the one making the speech and answering the questions that are posed in interventions, but of course I do not support targeting the low paid and that is not what has happened. If the hon. Gentleman is so reluctant to make up Conservative pensions policy on the hoof, was his hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) right when he said that under a Conservative Government no more public money would be going into occupational pensions?

Frank Field: The hon. Gentleman expresses concern about the budgetary impact on the low paid. Some Labour Members moved an amendment to protect them. Why did not the Conservative Opposition support us?

Chris Grayling: As the right hon. Gentleman knows, the detail of amendments often gives rise to additional issues, and I can only say that the wording put forward was not acceptable to the Opposition. However, we recognise, and we have been saying very clearly, that some of the policy steps that the then Chancellor has been taking, both in 1997 and more recently this year, are bemusing in nature because they target people on lower incomes. The tax changes this year will fall disproportionately on those who come close to the national minimum wage. That seems a strange step for a Labour Chancellor to take.
	It is today's pensioners, people who are on low incomes, who are paying the price for the Prime Minister's policies. Those same officials added:
	"Everyone in a money purchase scheme is a potential loser"
	and
	"those who are about to retire (or who have just retired) would be worst affected."
	The officials said that, at the time, 8 million people were in money purchase schemes. Yet in July 1997, when challenged by Conservatives that the tax changes to pension funds would have a devastating impact, the Prime Minister reassured people, saying:
	"Pensioners, in my view, will not lose out over this in the way that people are suggesting."
	The changes were not backed by the CBI at the time, despite the right hon. Member for Normanton (Ed Balls), now the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, a few weeks ago desperately claiming otherwise. Lord Turner, director general of the CBI from 1995 to 1999, dismissed that claim as completely untrue. Richard Lambert, the current head of the CBI, said that the right hon. Gentleman's claim was
	"a convenient bit of spin by the Treasury".
	How right he was, and how clear it is that the culture of spin will not die with the last Prime Minister but will carry on with the next one.

Michael Weir: Throughout his speech the right hon. Gentleman has talked about crises in the pension system, but there is nothing in the motion about the state pension. Many of the low paid to whom he refers rely almost entirely on the state pension for their income. Does he have anything to say about the difficulties with the state pension system as well as the private pension system?

Chris Grayling: There are, of course, huge issues within the state pension. As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Opposition support the principle, as espoused by the Government—I think that it has cross-party support—of restoring the earnings link. But we want to champion the cause of those who save for their own retirement. It is vital that, as a nation, we restore confidence in the principle of saving for retirement, and under this Government that principle has been dangerously weakened.
	It is not the case, as the Prime Minister has told the House, that his 1997 changes were good for pension funds. The charge against him is this. In the areas where he had responsibility, such as taxation and regulation—of course there are factors affecting the markets and the performance of pension funds that are outwith the ability of politicians to influence—in the past 10 years he has plainly got it wrong. The overall effect has been the continuous decline in pensions that we have witnessed.
	Since Labour took office in 1997 there has been a collapse in good quality occupational pension provision, and 60,000 occupational pension schemes have been wound up or have begun the process of winding up. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead said:
	"five sixths of the final salary schemes that have closed have done so since 2000; in other words, they have closed under our watch".—[ Official Report, 31 January 2006; Vol. 442, c. 257.]
	The membership of employer-sponsored defined benefit pension schemes has fallen to 35 per cent. of the working-age population, from 46 per cent. in 1997. Now, 47 per cent. of adult employees are not members of any pension scheme, and 6.7 million women have no retirement provision at all, 400,000 more than five years ago—10 years after the election of a Labour Government. That is a damning record.
	Rebuilding trust in occupational pension savings is a long-term issue that must be addressed. But there is also a pressing short-term issue that must be dealt with urgently, and it is something that the Secretary of State and I will undoubtedly be debating in the next few weeks. The failure of occupational pension schemes has, sadly, had all too human consequences. Since 1997, 125,000 people have lost pension savings and been left with little or nothing when their pension schemes failed. These are decent people who have saved all their lives and done the right thing. They did what successive Governments told them to do.
	Last year, the ombudsman produced an independent report into the scandal, and found the Government guilty of maladministration. Since then, the European Court of Justice, the High Court and the Public Administration Committee have criticised the Government's handling of the crisis. Yet Ministers have still refused to accept responsibility. The Government have consistently refused to provide those people with a proper package of assistance. All that they have is the failing financial assistance scheme.
	Some 10,000 people should be eligible for help from the FAS now, with an additional 115,000 or so people becoming eligible once they reach the age of 65. But so far the FAS has made payments to only around 1,300 people, and this matter should be in a prominent position in the Secretary of State's in-tray. The scheme has cost some £10 million to administer so far, but it has paid out only £4.9 million to the pensioners affected, and that is a scandalous failure. It is totally unacceptable. The scheme must do much better and quickly. The money is not yet getting to those who need it.
	The scheme chose to publish its most recent annual report, showing up this failure, last Wednesday, the day that the Chancellor became the Prime Minister, giving rise to more suspicions about burying bad news, one of the Government's more persistent traits.
	We have put forward constructive proposals to top up those people's pensions to Pension Protection Fund level without long-term public expenditure implications. Those proposals have support on both sides of the House and were passed in the other place last month as new clauses tabled to the Pensions Bill. The first test for the new Prime Minister and the new Secretary of State is whether they have the decency to acknowledge that those people need a better solution. Will the Secretary of State now give his support to those amendments? Will he give those 125,000 people the good news that they have been waiting for?
	There is another big pensions issue in the Secretary of State's in-tray. The gold-plated retirement promises made to millions of Britain's public sector workers have incurred, depending on whether one believes the Government or independent actuaries, liabilities of somewhere between £530 billion and £1 trillion, which is a staggering amount of money. The Government still will not disclose what the liabilities were at March last year, and the figures are now three months late. The new Prime Minister has claimed to usher in a new era of transparent Government, but he is not even willing to publish such an important figure. As usual, what he says and what he does are miles apart.
	Of course, public sector workers are entitled to fair treatment, and many perform vital roles under extremely difficult circumstances.

Chris Grayling: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman sympathises with that aspiration. We want to make sure that the people who have lost out as a result of pension collapses do not lose out indefinitely. We will continue to push proposals that give those people a better deal. It is to the discredit of this House that the Government still refuse to accept changes that command support from hon. Members on both sides of the House. When the proposal returns to the House next week or the week after, I hope that we will see a change in Government policy.
	The Secretary of State knows that we must all share the burden of demographic change, and it is the Government's duty to the taxpayer to ensure that the costs of public service pension provision are transparent. The cost of unfunded final salary benefits, with retirement at 60 for many, indexation and a lump sum allowance plus generous ill-health and death benefits for millions of public sector workers have created a gaping black hole in public funds, which will ultimately have to be filled by the taxpayer, which is one of the great challenges facing the new Secretary of State. It is an issue that the Prime Minister conspicuously failed to tackle throughout his time as Chancellor. Whenever problems were around, the former Chancellor was nowhere to be found. Now that he is Prime Minister, that will have to change.
	We have heard much in the past few days about how the Prime Minister is trying, rather improbably, to be the change that Britain needs. That claim will ring pretty hollow among current and future pensioners whose retirements have been jeopardised by the misjudgements of the new occupant of No. 10 Downing street. Today, 125,000 of the worst affected pensioners are still waiting for a pensions lifeboat, and millions of others face a retirement where money will be a constant struggle. The repair job will take a long time, and it will take cross-party consensus and the continued help of some of Britain's best financial minds. However, none of that work should provide a smokescreen from the finger of blame, which last Wednesday moved from No. 11 to No. 10 Downing street.

Peter Hain: I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform for the vision that he brought to the post that I now have the privilege to hold.
	I welcome the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) to his place. He has made an assured first speech after a day's preparation or less than that, and I congratulate him on his appointment. Although I welcome his promises to be constructive and to seek consensus, I am disappointed that he treated us to nearly half an hour of rhetoric and a certain obsession with the Prime Minister. By the way, the Prime Minister has leapt above the leader of the Conservative party in the popularity stakes, and the Labour party is now ahead of the Tory party, which has held a poll lead for the past year. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is right to be obsessed by the Prime Minister—if I were sitting in his seat, I would be obsessed by the success of the new Prime Minister in taking over from the most successful Labour Prime Minister.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Livingston (Mr. Devine) pointed out that the hon. Gentleman did not make a commitment to reverse the dividend tax credit change, which he and his predecessor have consistently castigated. The Opposition have had 10 years and two general elections to commit themselves to reversing the changes that we made. They could have done that today, so why did they not do so? The truth is that the Tories were responsible for beginning those changes. In fact, the leader of the Opposition was the adviser to Lord Lamont on the fifth occasion when they cut the dividend tax credit.
	In 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1993 the Tories made successive reductions in the rate of dividend tax credit from 30 per cent. to 20 per cent., and in 1996 they took away payable tax credits on some share buy-backs that happened to exploit the distortion caused by those credits. Unlike our changes and contrary to what the hon. Gentleman has said—I am sorry to correct him on his first day—those reductions were not offset by cuts in corporation tax. When we made our change, we cut corporation tax by 2p, and when corporation tax is cut, companies are, of course, more profitable, which means that they can pay more in employer contributions to pension funds, their dividends rise and they can pay more dividends to pension funds. The reality is that the system of payable tax credits before 1997 represented a serious distortion in the tax system, encouraging companies to pay out their profits as dividends rather than retaining them for reinvestment in the business.

David Drew: I welcome my right hon. Friend to his new position. He will have heard my earlier intervention on the impact of pensions holidays on those companies that subsequently became eligible for the financial assistance scheme, and it would be very useful if the Government were to publish that information. The Opposition spokesman did not mention a point of paramount importance, namely the use of early retirement in the '80s and '90s. In that period, early retirement was often compulsory in both the public sector and the private sector. It was a way of getting people off full-time employment, and it did immense damage. Rising expectations and longer life expectancies have resulted in that trend having a lasting impact, and I wonder whether the Government should examine the implications.

Peter Hain: As I will explain in a minute, that is simply not the case, and the evidence bears that out.
	Forgetting the shameless opportunism of the Conservatives in attacking a policy that they themselves launched, let us look instead at the way in which our corporation tax reforms have improved the climate for investment and the competitiveness of United Kingdom businesses—an approach that has delivered, over 10 years, the longest unbroken period of economic growth on record, the best combination of unemployment and inflation in the G7, instead of one of the worst when the Conservatives were in power, and an end to the years of economic instability that for so long had hampered the performance of UK business.
	The tax reforms announced in the 1997 Budget took place against the background of a strongly performing stock market and with about three quarters of pension funds in surplus, with total surpluses amounting to about £50 billion. Between 1993 and 1996, pension scheme assets had increased by 13 per cent. and total contributions by 12.5 per cent. If the tax changes were to have had the devastating effect claimed by the Opposition, one would have expected to see the situation deteriorate in the following years after those changes were brought in, but, until the global stock market fell at the end of the decade, that was simply not the case. In the years after the abolition of the dividend tax credit, pension scheme assets did not increase by the 13 per cent. by which they had in the previous three years under the Tories—they increased by four times as much, by 50 per cent. Total contributions increased by 18 per cent. and total pension income increased by a further 15 per cent. By 2006, even after the shock of the stock market crash, pension fund assets were more than £1 trillion. In fact, pension fund assets have doubled during the period of this Labour Government. What actually happened after our package of corporation tax changes was that companies paid more in employer contributions, dividends rose, assets rose, and payments to pension funds rose from £34 billion in 1996 to £39 billion in 1999, and by 2006 the figure of £71.3 billion was twice as much as it was under the Tories in 1996.
	The problems that occurred in the new century were due to the stock market downturn, not to the tax change, which was minuscule compared with pension fund turnover. As the respected economics commentator, Anatole Kaletsky, wrote in  The Times earlier this year,
	"How could the removal of a £5 billion annual subsidy suddenly reduce a pensions industry with more than £1,000 billion in assets from the 'healthiest in the world' to one that was nearly bankrupt? The answer is that it couldn't and it didn't."
	Others agreed. Take, for example, one of the Opposition's own leading experts, whom the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell will doubtless soon consult—Stephen Yeo. He said that it was
	"not even in the top three reasons"
	for the decline of defined benefit schemes.
	The hon. Gentleman accused the Government over the plight of those who have lost their pensions due to the collapse of their occupational pension schemes. The loss of people's pensions under these circumstances is not just a national scandal but a personal tragedy for all the individuals concerned. Through the Pension Protection Fund, this Government—our Government—have legislated to ensure that such a scandal could not be repeated in future. Through the newly expanded financial assistance scheme, which we introduced, we are providing help to some 125,000 people who lost their occupational pensions as a result of employer insolvency before the Pension Protection Fund was created.

Peter Hain: This is just the beginning, and it includes the set-up costs that the hon. Gentleman mentioned earlier. There will be funding to the tune of £8 billion over the period concerned. He should really welcome the fact that, as a result of the additional funding provided by this year's Budget, which raises the level of the financial assistance scheme from £2.3 billion to £8 billion in cash terms, all those affected will receive 80 per cent. of their expected core pension.
	Through those protections, the Government have shown their commitment to justice for all pensioners. They are protections that the Conservatives failed to put in place when they had the opportunity in Government.  [ Interruption . ] Hon. Gentlemen are saying, "We didn't need to." That is a very revealing comment, because in a moment I shall draw the House's attention to why those protections should have been put in place, given the complacency and abject irresponsibility of Conservative pension policy at the time.
	I recognise that many people, in this House and beyond, would like the level of help provided under the financial assistance scheme to be increased further. That is why the then Minister for Pensions Reform, my right hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (James Purnell), told the House on 18 April that we would
	"ensure that the funds that are available are applied...to get nearer to 90 per cent."—[ Official Report, 18 April 2007; Vol. 459, c. 333.]
	That aspiration means a genuine commitment to the victims of pension scheme collapse, not uncosted promises of false hope such as the Conservative proposal for a lifeboat fund. To take on directly what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell said earlier, such a fund would require unguaranteed interest-free loans from the taxpayer without any certainty that they could or would be repaid. Without such a guarantee that there are sufficient funds with unclaimed assets to cover those loans, that amounts to nothing more than an uncosted, open-ended spending commitment that could never be delivered. Indeed, the Conservatives cannot even agree on what the cost would be. The shadow Chancellor has claimed that there would be none. On 18 April 2007, he told Sky News:
	"this is not an additional burden on public expenditure...We are able to get the money back from these unclaimed pension assets".
	Yet on the very same day, his colleague, the former shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond), told the House:
	"I have acknowledged, and will do so again, that in granting a loan there is a...risk of a liability to the public purse."—[ Official Report, 18 April 2007; Vol. 459, c. 341.]
	They cannot both be right. That risk is all too real, as the Association of British Insurers made clear on 17 April 2007. What it says is very interesting. Responding to the Conservative proposal to use unclaimed assets to pay for the lifeboat fund, it predicted that the proposals
	"could have serious and damaging consequences for pensioners. In a pension scheme, all assets are ultimately used to pay pensions. 'Unclaimed pension assets' are not surplus to requirements. Stripping pension schemes of their assets would be robbing Peter to pay Paul."

Alan Simpson: Will the Secretary of State reflect on his experience in his previous ministerial post in Northern Ireland, where the orphan funds of banks were subject to the same sort of argument? When it was made clear that the matter would be pursued, the amounts found were 10 times those that the banking and financial services sector predicted—they claimed that only limited amounts would be available. Is it not legitimate to have similar expectations of the scale of the orphan assets that are available in rest of the UK?

Peter Hain: Indeed. That is what we have to find to provide for a scheme that is funded and capable of being delivered, not simply an empty promise. The latter would be indefensible given that individuals have suffered so badly. However, I agree that we must show all the ingenuity that we can. I am trying not to box myself in, but to attain the equivalent level of 90 per cent.—or as near to it as possible—that my right hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Mr. Hutton) promised when he was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Chris Grayling: I am sure that the Secretary of State is aware that the scheme that we propose is almost identical to that that was used at the time of the Maxwell pension collapse. There is therefore a clear precedent, which worked. However, I expect to meet several pensioners who are affected in the next few weeks. Is he saying that he rejects the option of a lifeboat? Is that the message that I should convey to those people?

Peter Hain: As my right hon. Friend says in his helpful intervention, we want one to float, not a lifeboat that will sink. We will provide—as we have already provided—unique assistance to those pensioners and individuals and we want to do better and improve that assistance. I shall shortly describe the solution that the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell should convey to them, and it is not his solution, which is proposed for sincere reasons—I do not doubt that—but does not stand up. Our solution has a chance of being successful.

Frank Field: Is it not true that, before the Conservatives tabled the motion, there was agreement across the House that we should use the unclaimed assets of banks and building societies? For some reason, which they have not explained, the Opposition thought that they should use what they call the unclaimed assets of insurance companies, where there are owners—either the policyholders or the shareholders. The Conservatives have unnecessarily muddied the waters and risked breaking up the coalition that was putting considerable pressure on my right hon. Friend. Although he says, rather sadly, "Isn't a pity the Conservative proposal doesn't stand up?", is he not rather pleased that the Conservatives have messed up their hand?

Peter Hain: My right hon. Friend, in his usual razor-like way, has put the matter in the lap of the Conservatives by showing that their proposal does not stand up. They should genuinely seek a consensus with us about how to resolve the matter. That is what the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell should tell the individuals who suffered so badly. I know from my constituency, and many others in Wales, just how tragic those cases are. For example, I have talked to former employees of Allied Steel and Wire in Cardiff. They can use no word to describe their horrendous predicament other than "robbery"—the robbery of their pensions, for which they had paid through deferred pay.
	I genuinely welcome ideas from all parties, but the lifeboat fund proposal is not a viable solution. However, I believe that there are others and I invite hon. Members, including the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, to contribute to the current review that Andrew Young of the Government Actuary's Department is conducting. I extend the same invitation to my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson).
	The focus of the review is on making the best use of the remaining assets in pension schemes that are winding up underfunded. The review is considering the way in which those assets, or other unallocated sources of non-public expenditure funding, could be used to increase assistance for affected scheme members.
	I assure the House that, if I can increase the amount of assistance available, I will. We must do all we can to help, but we must also ensure that anything we do is viable and sustainable. To propose something that cannot be delivered is not to support those robbed of their pensions, but to sell them short.
	The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell would have people believe that the Government inherited, then squandered, one of the best pensions environments in the world. That was the burden of his speech. Let us test that claim right now.
	In 1997, some 2.7 million pensioners were living in poverty, many facing the indignity of living on as little as £69 a week. If there has ever been a crisis in pensions, it was surely then. Many women were prevented from building a state pension entitlement in their own right; carers were similarly mistreated by a system predicated on a 19th century view of working lives and social relationships; millions were without access to occupational pensions; and the mis-selling of private pensions, overseen by the previous Conservative Government, was a national scandal.
	Meanwhile, the exceptional equity returns of the 1980s and 1990s allowed many defined benefit schemes to ignore the rapid rise in the underlying cost of their pension promises. That was compounded by botched policy such as the minimum funding requirement introduced by the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague), the current shadow Foreign Secretary, which failed to encourage employers to fund their pension schemes properly.
	Many firms took the decision in the 1980s and '90s—despite rising liabilities—to take contribution holidays, believing that a bullish equity market would be a long-term trend. Indeed, the Conservative Government believed that, too, as demonstrated by Nigel Lawson's decision effectively to cap pension fund surpluses in 1986. As the Pensions Commission noted:
	"The deep dip in contributions seen in the period 1988-91... almost certainly reflects the impact of this policy."
	This was no Tory utopia, but a Tory fool's paradise, with the Government irresponsible, reckless and complacent in encouraging employer pension holidays. To quote from the 2004 Pensions Commission report:
	"When the fool's paradise came to an end... companies adjusted rapidly, closing DB schemes to new members. A reduction in the generosity of the DB pensions promises which existed by the mid-1990s was inevitable."
	The stock market fall reduced the market value of pension scheme assets by some £250 billion between 1999 and 2002, and the effect of the package of tax changes on which the Opposition seek to pin the blame was entirely marginal.
	Furthermore, the closure of defined benefit schemes and the shift towards defined contribution was not a UK phenomenon brought about by changes made by the present Government. Far from it. Accelerated further by record demographic changes, the effects of the changing environment have been felt right across the world. In the US, for example, the number of defined benefit schemes have halved in fewer than 30 years, while direct contribution schemes have tripled. Australia has seen an 80 per cent. reduction in the number of workers covered by direct benefit schemes since the 1980s.
	Unlike the Conservative party, this Government have led the way in responding to the challenges that our pension system has faced since 1997. First, we tackled pensioner poverty. Thanks to the pension credit, winter fuel payments and a 9 per cent. real-terms increase in the basic state pension, we have lifted more than 2 million pensioners out of absolute poverty. The measures in our Pensions Bill will take us even further, with a new settlement for women and carers and a restoration of the earnings link that was removed by the Conservatives in 1980.
	Secondly, we took action to tackle the loss of confidence in the private pensions market—one reason for that loss of confidence was the pensions mis-selling scandal that we inherited from the Conservatives. In 1997, less than 2 per cent. of pension mis-selling cases had been satisfactorily resolved; by the end of 2002, more than 99 per cent. of consumers with mis-selling claims had been compensated, with total compensation reaching £11 billion. That £11 billion was the bill for Tory incompetence and Tory injustice over pensions mis-selling.

Peter Hain: I agree with the hon. Gentleman's distinction between absolute and relative poverty. If we take the relative poverty comparison, however, I think I am right in saying that more than 1 million pensioners have benefited.
	Through the Pension Protection Fund, the pensions regulator and the financial assistance scheme, the Pensions Act 2004 is helping to respond to the problems experienced by defined benefit occupational pensions and to boost security for scheme members. It is worth noting that the deficits for the 200 largest schemes fell by 40 per cent. in the past year alone.
	Sustainability and affordability lie at the heart of the long-term settlement in our Pensions Bill and our programme of long-term reform that meets the challenges of supporting an ever-ageing society. The programme offers tomorrow's pensioners the opportunity to plan and save for a secure retirement, and gives today's pensioners the dignity, security and justice they deserve.
	I had hoped—and I continue to hope—that hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, including the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, would join us in strengthening a lasting consensus around this long-term reform. However, tonight we have learned only one thing, namely that in reminding the House of their appalling pensions record in government, and by exposing their basic lack of substance on the issues that matter to the British public, the Opposition have shown that they are not yet ready for government. They have demonstrated the emptiness of their promises, and their crocodile tears will fool no one. It is time that the Opposition were pensioned off. Pensioners know where they will get justice. It is where they always have done: from Labour, and Labour alone. I invite my hon. Friends to reject this opportunist motion, and to vote for the amendment tonight.

Alan Simpson: It is quite sad that neither the motion before us nor the amendments on offer are particularly worth voting for. However, they all raise important points relating to our present framework of meaningful pension provision that need to be addressed. There are also points that need to be dismissed. I am saddened that the Conservatives continue to run with the idea of the £5 billion stealth tax on pension funds without making any reference to the far greater loss and act of theft that took place in 2002, when a complete collapse of stock market values wiped £250 billion off the value of UK pension funds. It was not accidental that we got into that mess, as I shall explain in a moment, and we must ensure that it is not repeated.
	Part of the muddle that we are now in is predicated on the legacy of pension contributions holidays. Those holidays were never on offer to workers themselves. A perverse contribution system was created whereby the Conservative Government introduced a pay-if-you-wish basis into pension schemes. That fundamentally broke the contractual link—the social contract—that had existed more or less since the end of the war, when it was assumed that it was an employer's duty to contribute to high-value, quality final salary pension schemes in the UK. The erosion and disappearance of that sense of duty alarms me, and that issue must be part of any new approach to a meaningful pensions framework for the 21st century. Unless we take that into account, we will find ourselves once again locked into the muddle that was created in 2002.
	Members on both sides of the House have pointed out that we are living longer, that this is not so much a political issue as a biological one, and that during our working lives we will have to contribute more to our pensions pots if they are to provide us with meaningful pensions throughout our retirement years. However, if we could turn the clock back to 2002 and double the amount of money that went into the UK pensions industry, we would simply have doubled the amount of money that was lost. That is because we were locked into a pensions framework that had become obsessed with the pursuit of equities. More money was chasing equities than there was meaningful value in the equity market.
	It was a certainty in the pensions industry that the bubble was going to burst. The only gamble was knowing when it would happen. When it burst, what disappeared was the real value of people's lifetime savings, and the contrast between our position in 2002-03 and our position 40 years earlier is stark. In 2003, 71 per cent. of pension savings were invested in equities, and 17 per cent. in UK national Government bonds. In 1962, by comparison, 51 per cent. of pension savings went into UK Government bonds. Those savings went into public investment in our infrastructure, but the truth about today's national requirements for reinvestment in infrastructure is that we would not need a single private finance initiative in the land if we returned to the prioritisation of meaningful investment in current and future infrastructure needs, rather than pursuing speculative activities on casino markets that will collapse at some point. The disappearance of that sanity and safety net provision is a tragic weakness—an Achilles heel—in the framework of pension thinking.
	We have to restore confidence in our ability to direct our pension savings into secure pensions that will deliver not only pensions sufficient for people to retire on but quality-of-life dividends every year rather than speculative dividends in pursuit of goods that may, or may not, have any real value in the global marketplace. We must tackle, too, the issue of people whose pensions have been stolen. I am grateful for the Secretary of State's offer of a further meeting, because every time that Government claims are tested by independent judges in courts in the UK or in Europe or by the ombudsman, they do not stand up. We must bring some honesty to our claims because, so far, that has been missing. It is not true to say that the financial assistance scheme will deliver 80 per cent. of the core pension, because in practice the core pension deducts all inflation linking that workers were promised; it deducts the tax-free lump sum that they were promised; it deducts the revaluation that they were promised; it deducts many benefits to which widows were entitled; it deducts ill health and early retirement benefits; and it ignores the retirement age that was built into the scheme. Once all those entitlements have been deducted, 80 per cent. of the lowest figure is taken and 22 per cent. of tax is deducted at source. In reality, therefore, the 80 per cent. claimed figure becomes much less.
	In practice, that has to be tested against the experience of those who are entitled to full payments under the financial assistance scheme. Of the 125,000 people whose pensions were stolen, 10,000 have reached retirement age, of whom only just over 1,000 have received anything. So far, payments amounting to £4 million have gone to pensioners, but £5 million has gone to the people administering the scheme. It is barking mad to run a scheme if we end up paying less to contributors than to those who are charged with its administration. The other place has made sensible, constructive amendments to the Pensions Bill, which I genuinely hope that Members on both sides of the House have the courage and wisdom to support when the Bill returns to the Commons.
	This is not just about the 125,000 pensioners whose pension contributions have been stolen. We have to restore confidence in the pensions system. If future generations of young people are to believe in the security of the system and contribute more to the collective pension pot it is important that we restore credibility. At the moment, their parents and grandparents tell them, "It's a mug's game." The kids who are now entering employment and whom we are asking to contribute more have direct experience from their own homes, families, streets and communities, where people are saying, "Don't do that. I did that all my life, and what happened? They stole it. So if you want to be sensible now, just go ahead and spend it. You're a fool if you sign up to a system that doesn't give guarantees that the money you think you're putting aside as savings will actually be there for you when you need it—when you come to the end of your working life."
	This issue is therefore as much to do with confidence in our future pension schemes as it is to do with justice for those who have been lifetime contributors to previous schemes. I do not seek to imply that the Government were responsible for the losses, but we were responsible for setting the rules of the game and leaving people with the belief that their pension contributions were guaranteed when they were not.
	When we return to this matter, I hope that we will not only get caught up in the to and fro of debate and exchanges of half-truths about pension commitments, but that we will also have the courage to address the inequalities and injustices that currently exist and set out a framework of visionary changes in pension provision that will allow the young and the old to stand proud and to endorse what we claim to be doing.

David Laws: I am pleased to be able to contribute to the debate, and I should like to start by welcoming to their posts the new Secretary of State and the Minister of State with responsibility for pension reform, the hon. and learned Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien). In all parts of the House, there is a view that they are taking over from two very competent predecessors who helped to forge a pensions consensus on some aspects of pension reform; I do not say that without qualification, but I hope that the pensions consensus will last. It illustrates the political skill of both predecessors that one managed allegedly to say very rude things about the former Chancellor and still to be included in his Cabinet now that he is Prime Minister, while the other is now a Secretary of State at an early age. I wish the Secretary of State and the Minister all the best, as I do the new Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). He comes to his role with a reputation as a parliamentary Rottweiler; he has had clashes in the past, and perhaps we will witness more in the future.
	I also wish all the best to my successor. Members will no doubt have been closely following today's Liberal Democrat reshuffle. My hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander) will take over from me from tomorrow morning. I can therefore make this speech rather more reflective in tone than it otherwise might have been, and more forward-looking in content without too much political knockabout.
	One of the achievements of the predecessors of the new Secretary of State and Minister was to have forged the pensions consensus, along with Lord Turner and his excellent commissioners. How far that moved forward pensions policy is not to be underestimated. It required all three major political parties, and the minority parties, to accept the following changes to pensions policy, none of which was in their entirety in our 2005 manifestos: the increase in the pension state age, which was politically sensitive and economically important; the permanent restoration of the earnings link; the introduction of personal accounts and the acceptance that the state's role in second-tier provision would be lessened; the introduction of automatic enrolment; and the agreement on compulsory employer contributions. All of them are major changes, and I hope that they will last. They were the reasons we backed the Pensions Bill, notwithstanding the concerns we have about the detail of the reforms and our genuine worries that that might mean that, in spite of the agreement that we have, the pensions proposals prove not to be as successful in practice as Ministers hope.
	Today, rather than going back over some of the arguments about who did what in 1997 and 1998, which—I agree with the Secretary of State—are not the explanation for the downturn in occupational pensions and, in any case, do not seem to be relevant in terms of the implications for pension policy now, I wish to highlight three issues of future pension policy that should be of concern and interest to Ministers in the future.
	The first, and easiest to deal with, is the compensation for those people presently in the financial assistance scheme, which the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) mentioned. I was pleased to hear the comments by the Secretary of State today, although he has had only a short time to reflect on these matters. I hope that in the cautious and constructive way in which he made his comments about the financial assistance scheme and the Pension Protection Fund, he is signposting the fact that he will take the initiative in that area and bring to an end the long period, lasting a couple of years, in which the Government have ended up making major concessions, usually as a consequence of external pressure, from the other political parties and their own Back Benchers, the courts, the parliamentary ombudsman, the Public Administration Committee or—at the moment, at least—the other place. All that has meant not only that the Government have extracted the minimum possible political benefit from the largest possible economic concessions, but that those people who are waiting for decent and fair compensation have had to wait a very long time. As the Secretary of State will probably know already—and if he does not, he will find out in time—those waiting for a fair settlement feel great bitterness.
	It is felt to be almost inevitable that the Government will reach the PPF level of benefits to which we all aspire. Even in their own terms, they have gone almost three quarters of the way there through what has already been allocated. Many of us hope that the Government will, in the next couple of months, go the whole way. When we look at the remaining cost of delivering the rest of the reform, it is—especially over a period of 50 or 60 years—modest and affordable. The Secretary of State will already have noticed that the figures that his Department is using do not include any reduction in the cost of means-tested benefits or the revenues from taxation that would reduce the costs. That is the first issue and I hope that we will hear something positive on it from the Secretary of State.
	The second issue is in many ways the most important for the success of the Government's reforms. I have been teased on this point by the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) who has been a Front-Bench spokesman on this issue for several years. He teased me about the potential parallel consensus between the consensus to which we are signed up to in the House and those areas of disagreement that we have constantly flagged up. I said to the hon. Gentleman the last time he raised that point that I entirely agree with him that there is a parallel consensus outside this place, and the Secretary of State and the Minister will also discover that. Although most hon. Members and, to some extent, those outside think that the main planks of pension reform are sensible, they also think that the excessive reliance on means-testing, which is still part of the system, will be a major problem for the Government.
	To the extent that those people are the existing generation of pensioners, they also feel that pension reform is irrelevant for them, because the earnings link will not be restored until 2012 or 2015. By that time, as many as a third of the existing pensioner population will no longer be with us, and the Secretary of State will discover that pensioners in the real world outside this place do not think that those "great" reforms are nearly as exciting as we do. I hope that the Secretary of State will not give up on the idea of persuading the Chancellor, no doubt at an appropriate moment in the electoral cycle, to consider bringing forward the restoration of the earnings link, because most people would regard that as sensible. It would also be very popular.

David Laws: I entirely agree and, as is always the way with such interventions, I was about to develop precisely that point.
	People are very bitter that the introduction of the earnings link will be delayed for so long, as that will mean that the state pension will continue to wither even further in relation to earnings. However, the problem is that we are building on a very low base: one suspects that the Chancellor signed off on the deal only because the figures for the cost of state pension reform show that, even in 2020, we will be spending a share of gross national product on the state pension architecture that is less than we spend today.
	The price that the Chancellor extracted is that we have a very low basic state pension, with the result that everyone who relies on pensioner credit and means-tested benefits will be in poverty. I hope that the new Secretary of State will not believe his Department's spin about pensioner poverty. It is true that it has declined considerably since 1997, but it is also true that Britain is one of the worst countries in the European league table when it comes to our residual level of pensioner poverty. The EU figures published by the Department in a written answer earlier this year show that almost a quarter of our pensioner population still lives in relative poverty.
	I hope that the Secretary of State will continue the process of pushing down pensioner poverty. In contrast, the formal position of the Government under his predecessor appeared to be that the decline in pensioner poverty had to be consolidated, but that it did not need to be taken further.
	A consensus does exist outside the House to the effect that, because we are building on such a low basic state pension, we may end up undermining the personal accounts that are so vital to pension reform. When the Secretary of State's predecessor announced his major pension proposals and the great consensus on pensions, he said to many people, both publicly and privately, that everything he was doing in respect of the state pension was designed to make personal accounts work. He added that the success or failure of all the reforms would be determined by whether personal accounts could be made to work. However, the fact that we are building on a very low basic state pension means that almost 50 per cent. of the people who are to be the target audience for personal accounts will face means-testing—for pension credit and housing benefit, and for all the other means-tested benefits.
	The promise offered by Lord Turner was very attractive, and the former Secretary of State offered it too, until he realised what he was saying and the size of the liabilities that he was building up for the future. The promise was that people would get back £2 for every £1 that they put into their personal accounts. It was a no-brainer, suggesting that everyone should have a personal account, but the promise simply cannot be delivered. It may be that some people—perhaps 10 to 20 per cent.—could end up not getting a decent return and even losing money if they go for a personal account, while a significant number will get returns of between £1 and £2 only for every £1 that they put in.
	The people involved in personal accounts are likely to be on very low pay already, probably with high mortgage and credit card debt. Many, and especially the women among them, will be unable to predict their future work patterns, which means that they will not be confident about whether personal accounts are right for them. The problem for the Government is that, if they describe the risks in too much detail, the take-up of personal accounts could be very low, whereas if they do not describe the risks in enough detail they may end up being accused of Government-sponsored mis-selling that will come back to haunt us later on.
	The answer must be to increase the basic state pension, but I suspect that Ministers will try to introduce changes such as trivial commutation to offset some of the effects of means-testing. The result will be an extremely complex system, and the Pensions Policy Institute has said that the Government will also have to spend something like £500 million on changing the rules. The total could come to more than £1 billion, and all it will achieve is that less than a quarter of the people who might otherwise have been hit by means-testing will be removed from its effects. So solving the problem by changing the rules and allowing people to take lump sums rather than affecting their means-tested benefits could be messy, could dissuade people from saving and could undermine the personal accounts.
	In spite of the consensus on the major elements of pension reform, I cannot predict whether personal accounts will have been a success when we look back in 10 or 20 years. All of us know that in the great pensions consensus of the 1970s, there was not even a Division on the state earnings-related pension scheme. The Labour Government pushed it through and the Conservatives did not move on it. Only a handful of people were in the House. Only a few years later, because the scheme had not been well worked out, the whole thing unravelled. Our fear is that that might happen to personal accounts.
	The other big concern is about occupational pensions. There is an increasing gap between the private sector and the public sector, and there is a bitterness about it. The right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) said in evidence to the Select Committee that it was about time that hon. Members on both sides of the House stopped rehearsing our prejudices about public sector pensions and started to focus on the substance of public sector pension reform. After all, many public sector pension schemes are affordable; others are not. Some, usually low-paid, public sector workers have lousy pensions. Usually higher-paid public sector workers, including MPs and judges, have good pension schemes.
	We have argued that we ought to have a Turner-type independent commission to do what the Turner commission did and put the evidence in the public domain so that we can reform public sector pensions in a sensible, managed way rather than ending up reforming them in a hurry in five or 10 years because they have become unaffordable. We are watching carefully and so is the Conservative spokesman. Ministers know that the cost of public sector pensions is going up all the time. The Government have been holding back the latest set of statistics, presumably because the discount rates on the cost of public sector pensions will inflate the figures.
	I hope that, if the Government are trying to look to the Turner consensus as a basis for pensions reform, the Secretary of State will look at what Lord Turner said on 11 June in another place, when he was critical of the way in which the Government had handled public sector pension reform. He said:
	"the deal that the Government reached with the unions in 2005 is inadequate and will need to be revisited". —[ Official Report, House of Lords, 11 June 2007; Vol. 692, c.1559.]
	He has mentioned before, publicly as well as privately, that this is not just a right-left issue. It is much more complex. Many low-paid public sector workers get a bad deal. Many of those people who are going to join public sector pensions in the future, who have had a rather bad deal as a consequence of the way in which the unions have negotiated, will suffer. Women who have had many career breaks and are existing members of public sector pension schemes may lose their right to retire at 60, whereas men who stay on will be able to keep it. There are all sorts of aspects which are not simple issues of right and left.
	The final aspect of occupational pensions that worries me a lot comes back in some ways to the point that the hon. Member for Nottingham, South made. With the exception of a lot of well-paid people in the public sector, including MPs, an immense risk transfer is going on in pensions. In the past, many of us could rely on public sector pension schemes, private sector pension schemes and state pension schemes that delivered not just the basic state pension but some kind of earnings-related pension. That meant that many not very financially literate or affluent people could rely on a second pension, often from their employer. In the future, we shall be asking many of those people to provide for themselves through a defined contribution scheme that few of them will understand, will involve a lot of market risk and will be uncertain in relation to the impact of means-testing. We are already seeing a levelling down of employer contributions and an axing of salary-related pension schemes. There is a real risk as a consequence that we will have a generation in 20 or 30 years retiring on really inadequate pensions, including those people who will be saving in personal accounts, who will be saving nothing like enough if they are saving at the default extremely low rates, which will produce inadequate returns for people.
	The hon. Member for Nottingham, South was right to say that much pension provision in the past was based to some extent on employers' perceptions of their responsibility. Given the way they have suffered recently from what has happened to pension schemes and the enormous amount of money they have had to put in, they will understandably be happy to wash their hands of that responsibility. Many of them will be happy to reduce their contribution rates to the personal account level, to as little as they can get away with, which will be devastating, especially for people who will have to rely on personal accounts, because they will probably be the least able to manage their finances.
	As well as making personal accounts as accessible and easy to use as possible, and not prone to employers' dodging, I hope the Government will talk to businesses and others about what they can do to maintain good occupational schemes—perhaps not final salary schemes, but salary-related schemes. All is not necessarily lost for those schemes, but there is a risk that the introduction of personal accounts will lead to a further stampede out of occupational pensions in a way that we may regret in the future.
	The predecessors of the Secretary of State and the Minister had some major achievements, on which I hope their successors can build, although in some senses they have been left with the difficult bits of turning some good planks of reform into something that will actually deliver the goods. I wish them all the best in that.

Frank Field: I shall be brief, Madam Deputy Speaker.
	This evening, we bid farewell to the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws) just as the Leader of the Opposition moves someone who is generally regarded as a Rottweiler into the shadow portfolio. Tomorrow, there will be a new Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesman, so it will be interesting to discover which party leader made the right decision when we reflect on matters at the election. However, I welcome the new Front-Bench spokesmen, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), who leads for the Opposition, and in particular I welcome my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State. I should like to give both of them a message and I shall address the Conservative Opposition first.
	The thrust of the motion, although perhaps not the content of the speech made by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, was about restoring confidence in pensions. I have a suggestion that the Opposition might like to think seriously about if they want to restore confidence. In this Parliament, they have as yet issued no set of proposals about welfare reform, let alone pension reform. The decision they have to make is where they draw the line between what risks individuals should bear for their pension provision and what risks we should collectively bear. I suggest that the key dividing line is a pension scheme in the future that ensures that everybody who plays their part fully in society receives a pension that takes them out of means-testing when they retire. The risks involved should be shared by all of us. It is of course desirable that people should have more than that for their pension provision, but that is not a concern for taxpayers—bearing that risk is for individuals themselves.
	My Government have not yet made that division, so my second piece of advice is addressed to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in the decisions he faces. I want to focus on the role of personal accounts. My right hon. Friend was right to say that not everybody has been covered by occupational schemes. There has been a huge number of poor and desperately poor people, and the Labour Government have redistributed more resources for poorer pensioners than any Administration since we established the state retirement pension. The Government deserve huge credit for that, but they way in which they achieved the goal is unstable. They did it largely on the basis of the pension credit, which is means-tested. Therefore, perhaps 40 per cent. of our electors do not know whether it will pay them to save or whether, if they do save, they will be substantially better off. If they are not better off because they are covered by the pension credit, they will see other people who did not bother to save receiving an income through means-testing that is equal to, if not greater than, the one that they end up with. For the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) outlined, the message not to save has gone out to people.
	I therefore hope that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State will return to the decision that we make about how adequate the first tier of pension should be if we are then to rely on people building on it through their own efforts. If we do not do that, I will put things much stronger than the hon. Member for Yeovil. I see a mega mis-selling scandal coming up the tracks and we will not be able to blame the Legal and General or the Pru. The House will have put in place what is euphemistically called "soft compulsion", making people save for schemes that may pay them little or, as the hon. Gentleman said, nothing.

Frank Field: Or worse, as my hon. Friend says. In that scenario, we will face the worst of all possible outcomes.
	That is my advice to those on both Front Benches, but may I sound a note of caution about us as politicians? It is undoubtedly true that occupational pensions have been the Crown jewels of our pension system and that previous Members of Parliament thought that they were far too good for just a few workers. They thought, "We must spread them to their dependants and we must have widows benefits and orphans benefits." We put a strain on occupational schemes that employers never thought would be there when they began to build up the schemes. With the Opposition insisting on tax changes, we ran down the surpluses, and while my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State mounted a great defence of the advance corporation tax changes, my guess with hindsight is that if we had our time again we would not make that change now.
	I merely emphasise that this wonderful place, the House of Commons, sometimes gets a fit of self-righteousness and starts legislating in a way that is improper, and we have done that with occupational pensions. I hope that we are about to enter a deadly serious phase of the debate in which the Opposition address the key question of where we draw the line between when risks should be pooled and when risks should be taken by individuals. I hope that with the new brief that my right hon. Friend has, he will look carefully at how the personal accounts that have to play such a key role in our long-term reforms do not land us with the charge of state mis-selling at the end of the day.

John Butterfill: It has been a thoughtful debate, but there are fundamental problems that we need to address. The principal difficulties with the funding of occupational pensions are partly the additional benefits that the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) has identified, but largely increased longevity coupled with a terrible shortage of index-linked gilt securities.
	The hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) mentioned the desirability of further investment in Government securities, but the real yield on index-linked gilts today is below 1 per cent. That is incredibly low, but we have been forcing pension funds to go into such investments since my party introduced the Pensions Act 1995 and the minimum funding requirement, which I opposed at the time. That has partly contributed to the problem. The huge stock market crash a few years ago was a phenomenon that always happens in equity markets: they go up and down, but overall the direction of the yield is pretty firmly upwards—as is logical in a free western economy. So, the stock market is not the cause of the problem. It is the concentration on index-linked gilts, as being the only way of delivering a pensions promise, that has been a terrible mistake.
	I will deal first with state pensions. The present level of the state pension is much too low and the state pension is very unfair to women. I think that 32 per cent. of all women have no pension and almost 4 million have less than a full pension. The Government have tried to address that and I pay tribute to them for some of the things that they have done in recent pensions legislation, which is improving the situation. However, until we move to a pension at a decent level—not one that provides any luxury, but one that at least offers some sort of standard of living for those who would otherwise not benefit—we are not a civilised society.
	The link to earnings must be restored. The Government have said that they will do that, but one wonders when. When pressed, they said, "Well, we hope to do it by 2012." However, there is not even a firm promise for 2012 and by the time we get to 2012 a lot of my constituents, and those of other right hon. and hon. Members, may well no longer be here to benefit from the change. I know that people will say that it is not affordable, but there are ways in which it can be made affordable and the Government have latched on to one of them, which is to increase the pension age.
	If people are going to live longer and longer—as they are thanks to improvements in our medical knowledge and our NHS—we will have to accept that they will probably have to work longer in order to be able to pay for that. That is happening not just here, but in Scandinavia and the United States. It is a reality of increased longevity that increasing the pension age will be the only way to pay for decent pensions in retirement.
	Having so many pensioners on means-tested benefits is rather demeaning for them. I know that pension credit is well meaning, but it is intrusive. About 1.7 million people who are entitled to it do not claim it, partly because of the level of intrusion that they feel it involves. I think that the solution is to increase the pension to some sort of a living wage, without any means-testing, and to pay for that by increasing the retirement age—ultimately, possibly from 67, which is what has been proposed, to 70. We can restore people's dignity in that way. Perhaps we can also look at clamping down further on sickness benefits and early retirement, which I will come to later, because there are problems in both the public and the private sectors.
	When looking at where we are going, we must look in particular at what is happening in the public sector, of which we are a part. Unfortunately, many of the public sector schemes are totally unfunded. As such, we are mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren. That is not a responsible way to go forward. Although we have schemes where there is no contribution or only a very small contribution, that is not a direction in which we can go in the long term. We need known levels of funding from the Exchequer and reasonable levels of funding from those participating in the schemes. That cannot happen overnight because people have contracts of employment; it will only happen in the future, after there has been change to the basis and structure of public sector schemes, but I think that it can be done.
	We are already doing some of what is necessary. In some areas of the public sector, the levels of contribution are quite high. Certainly, changes that have been made to fire service schemes, police schemes and armed services schemes have led to substantial contributions being paid. To its credit, the House voted for a substantial increase to its contributions, too, and we now pay 10 per cent., which is far more than is paid in most public sector schemes.
	In the rest of the public sector, we have to consider the retirement age. For Members of Parliament, the earlier retirement age ends in 2009, whereas for the rest of the public sector we suggested that it do so in 2013, so I hope that we have set an example that can be followed. Public sector transfer clubs need to end because they are costly to the public sector. Such arrangements do not exist in the private sector—if a person transfers to another scheme in the private sector, they get what their lump of money will buy as they enter the new scheme. It is wrong that we should give the public sector and, indeed, ourselves privileges that do not exist in the private sector.
	I agree that personal accounts are an extremely good idea, but they need to be built on because a total of 8 per cent. will not give anyone a very substantial salary. There will be a problem if we retain pension credits, because as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead said, as long as we maintain means-tested benefits there will be a serious problem with possible claims of mis-selling. People will say, "Why did I bother to save when it simply means that I will be disqualified from state benefits?" There may be ways of overcoming that; for example, there could be an increased level of disregard for income under that structure. There could also be a capital disregard for relatively small pots of pensions money. We will have to look hard at the issue if we are to escape the problems of mis-selling.
	I wanted to deal with the problem relating to the purchase of annuities, but that will have to be left for another day. I simply suggest that there may be alternatives that would still give protection to the Treasury—indeed, they would actually increase its total revenue—but that would not take us away from the idea that there needs to be a pot of money from which people draw their pensions.

Tom Levitt: In High Peak, we see the effectiveness of the Government's commitment to securing sustainable occupational pensions. In Chapel-en-le-Frith, there is the largest of the 12 British plants of the American-owned company, Federal Mogul, which is one of this country's premier producers of brake linings for a wide range of vehicles. The name of the original company, Ferodo, is synonymous with excellence in the world of brake linings. It was established about 100 years ago, but for most of its life, Ferodo was part of the British company Turner and Newall, but it was taken over, pension fund and all, by Federal Mogul in the early 1990s.
	To understand why the Turner and Newall pension fund has become such a hot potato in recent years, we must look at what was happening to the company at the turn of the 21st century. By that time, the company had awarded itself 15 years of pension contribution holidays in the previous 25 years, on both Turner and Newall's watch and, latterly, Federal Mogul's watch. Yet the fund was still viable, still operating and absolutely huge. In 2001, the company went into administration to protect itself from bankruptcy. The reasons for that had nothing at all to do with the British operation of Federal Mogul.
	What was happening was that thousands of claims for damage to people's health from exposure to asbestos were being lodged in the American courts. Many of those claims were held by the company to be spurious, but some courts—one in Memphis was especially permissive—were allowing millions and millions of dollars worth of claims, to the extent that the viability of the company was being called into question. I do not want to belittle the asbestos issue for a moment. Those whose health has genuinely suffered from exposure to asbestos should be compensated, but in the litigious atmosphere of the United States the claims were excessive, and the company claims that the courts were deciding unreasonably against it. Its business interests got protection from bankruptcy by putting the whole of Federal Mogul, the international company, into administration under American law.
	What no one predicted then was that that would make it impossible for the Turner and Newall fund to operate under British law once the company came out of administration. In July 2004 the company concluded that the pension fund was not compliant with British insolvency law and the fund would have to close. It was not close to collapse. It was, as I said, huge—over £1 billion in size, from memory—but the law said that if the fund was not big enough to cover all its potential liabilities, the company could not be released from insolvency. That is a sensible law, in principle, although in this case, the chances of all the fund's liabilities being called in at once were infinitely small.
	What did that mean? It meant that my constituents, the Turner and Newall pensioners, were looking at a pension of only about 8p for every pound that they would otherwise have expected to receive. There was no safety net. There was no protection. The financial assistance scheme was coming into existence, but it was tiny. It would not cover Turner and Newall's liabilities.
	That summer I, along with other right hon. and hon. Members, met Ministers to discuss the potential failure of one of the very biggest pension schemes in the whole country. Fortunately for us, at that time the Pensions Bill was going through Parliament. It created the Pension Protection Fund, a vehicle almost tailor-made for the Turner and Newall situation. We made sure that Ministers were fully aware of the situation and the consequences, should that fund fail.
	The PPF emerged from the Pensions Act 2004 as the best possible safety net or lifeboat—call it what you will. Taking over the assets of failed pension schemes and taking a levy from the pensions industry, the PPF would provide a 100 per cent. payment of existing pensioners' pensions and typically 90 per cent. of future ones, albeit frozen at that level and capped then at £25,000 a year. These restrictions add to the stability of the PPF and they are a small price to pay for pensions being saved at all. The only problem that we saw with the PPF in 2004 was that it would not start until 2006. The Turner and Newall fund had to limp on. With injections of cash from the company, it was able to raise its offer to pension fund members to 50p or 60p in the pound, far better than 8p, but nothing like as good as the PPF potential offer would be.
	Meanwhile, I continued to act on behalf of my constituents, the largest single group of Turner and Newall pensioners in the country. I co-ordinated the work of an ad hoc cross-party group of MPs, working closely with the trade unions. I presented a national petition to Parliament in support of the Turner and Newall pensioners. I arranged for fund members, including union representatives from my constituency, to meet the American chairman of Federal Mogul to express their grievances here in Parliament. I invited the then Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to Chapel-en-le-Frith to meet aggrieved members of the fund. I spoke at a national rally of occupational pension fund members in Brighton, and I continued to lobby Ministers, the fund's independent trustee appointed by the courts, the administrators of the company, the PPF itself and others to ensure that the interests of my constituents were paramount. In short, I was doing my job.
	The Turner and Newall fund is undergoing an 18-month assessment to see how the PPF would work. The independent trustee has to satisfy himself, by law, that there is no better alternative available before he will be allowed to take the fund into the PPF, but he will not get a better offer. It is irresponsible of some campaigners on the issue, not least a certain Conservative councillor, Councillor Bingham of Chapel-en-le-Frith, to go round suggesting that a better alternative to the PPF is there for the taking. The implication from local Tories in my constituency is that taxpayers' money will be used to save failed pension funds under a Tory Government. That is in direct contradiction to the edict of the hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Osborne) and it is misleading. It will not happen.
	Until yesterday, the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) was the Opposition pensions spokesman. Today he has moved on, and frankly I am not surprised. Perhaps this, taken from last week's issue of the  Buxton Advertiser, was really the best that the hon. Gentleman had to offer. Speaking 10 days ago in my constituency, he said:
	"If we can establish the evidence to support the idea of an alternative to PPF I am happy to present that to the government decision-makers for the necessary change in regulations...What we are talking about is whether it is appropriate to change the law to allow schemes like this an alternative rather than to go into PPF."
	I do not know what that means. I do not know what the alternative is that he is offering on behalf of the Conservative party, and I am quite sure that he did not either. How will he deliver it without access to taxpayers' money? Does he really believe in his heart that something other than PPF will emerge in the next 12 months to restore the original value of the Turner and Newall fund. It is an irresponsible myth, just like the motion that we are debating. The Tories might have chosen tonight's subject for debate, but they have nothing to offer on occupational pensions.

Nigel Waterson: It is a great pleasure to take part in the debate. I feel like a greybeard in this company of new rising stars on the Government Front Bench and departing stars on the Liberal Benches. I begin by adding my own warm welcome to the new Secretary of State—I hope that he knows what he is taking on—and the new Minister of State. The revolving door that has all too often been the Department for Work and Pensions in recent years has not always been a happy place for Ministers. Since 1997, we have seen seven Secretaries of State, and since I was appointed to this position, I have shadowed no fewer than four Ministers. I am particularly pleased that we had the usual distinguished and thoughtful contribution from a former Minister, the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field). I genuinely wish the new Ministers well in tackling the continuing pensions crisis.
	In recent days, the new Prime Minister has spoken of little else but change. In a short speech at the door to No. 10, he must have mentioned the word eight or nine times. We have heard, and no doubt will continue to hear, of a number of new initiatives across a range of policy areas, but what has been totally missing—unless I have failed to spot it—is any mention of pensions. This is all the more surprising because polling shows that this is a failure for which most voters hold the former Chancellor to blame. I am pleased that we had the usual authoritative contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill), and we also heard from the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) who has been through the Turner and Newall saga from start to finish, as he described.
	But when it comes to long-term pensions reform, we Conservatives have taken a wholly responsible and non-partisan position. We have broadly accepted the conclusions of Lord Turner and his colleagues and gone along with the Government on gradually increasing the state pension age, on help for carers especially women, and on restoring the link with earnings for the state pension. Indeed it would have been churlish not to do so given that those were mostly our last election manifesto. In short, we have worked hard to build a genuine consensus on pensions, and I see no reason why that should not continue to be the case.
	We have also given our broad support to the proposals for personal accounts. But we still have serious concerns about the design of this new system. Key decisions on that design must be made by politicians, not delegated to unelected people, no matter how expert.
	During debates in the House on the Pensions Bill, we flagged up four major concerns, some of which have been discussed today. Those were means testing; the risk of levelling down existing pension provision with the introduction of personal accounts; the potential for mis-selling; and the issue of confidence.
	On mis-selling, I am very much on the same wavelength as the right hon. Member for Birkenhead. There is a real issue here, and the Secretary of State will not yet have had time to absorb this kind of detail, but his attention will no doubt be drawn to the conclusions of the Pensions Policy Institute and the crucial differences between its research as to the likely level of means-testing after the reforms and the Government's own projections. Again, the crucial difference between the two models is that the PPI model takes account of housing benefit and the Government model does not, which relates to the effects on people who rent in retirement.
	I shall come on to issues of confidence in a minute, but I want to deal with the valedictory remarks of the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws)—for all I know, my remarks may be valedictory, but nobody has informed me yet. Although the Liberal position may improve or change with the arrival of the new spokesman, it is at best confusing and at worst likely to discourage pension saving. The Liberal Democrats want to abolish tax relief for pension contributions, certainly for higher rate taxpayers. It is the only party, apart from the Government, which backs the continuation of compulsory annuitisation. It is still peddling its idea of a citizens pension, which is unworkable, unaffordable and a total non-starter, because no major party is prepared to do it. I say in a caring way to the hon. Member for Yeovil that the Liberal Democrats have consistently placed themselves outside a serious and responsible consensus on long-term pensions reform. We will see whether the new broom produces different results.
	The crucial priority for any Government must be to restore confidence in pensions saving. How can we expect younger workers to save for their retirement, when almost every week they see bad news stories about people who have lost their pensions? Shortly before the new Prime Minister relinquished his iron grip on the Treasury, he was taken to task in this House for his £5 billion-a-year raid on pension funds. Was he embarrassed, abashed or apologetic? Not a bit of it. He said:
	"I tell the House that I do not apologise".—[ Official Report, 17 April 2007; Vol. 459, c. 176.]
	He went on to say:
	"We made the right decision".—[ Official Report, 17 April 2007; Vol. 459, c. 183.]
	That was a slap in the face for the 125,000 victims who lost all or most of their pensions through no fault of their own. However, we must not forget that absolutely everyone with a pension scheme has lost because of the £100 billion or more that the Chancellor has stripped from their retirement savings.
	Having created the problem in large measure, the then Chancellor was happy to leave those people without help or to the tender mercies of the failed financial assistance scheme. As my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) has said, the latest FAS annual report was sneaked out on the very day that the new Prime Minister took office. It is a dismal and depressing document, cementing the impression that the FAS is a failing, incompetent and useless organisation. In some two years, it has succeeded in getting payments to little more than 1,000 pensioners, but no fewer than 10,000 victims are already eligible for help. Amazingly, the FAS spent more on running itself, £4 million, than it paid out, £3.5 million.
	The former Chancellor, among others, continues to claim that victims will get 80 per cent. of their entitlement, but that is patently untrue. The Secretary of State fell into the same trap himself, although perhaps with more excuse, when he discussed 80 per cent. of "core expected pension". "Expected pension" is a lot more than "core expected pension", which has been introduced through the FAS. Most people will get half of what they expected to get.
	As has been said, the Government have been told on several occasions by the ombudsman, the European Court, the Select Committee and the High Court that there has been maladministration, and they are now appealing the High Court decision. However, they are still ignoring the legitimate demands of the pension victims. The Government will have another opportunity to right that wrong, because the Lords has voted in favour of the cross-party amendments setting up a lifeboat fund, which would provide PPF-level compensation for those victims. Back-Bench Labour MPs who have constituents in this predicament, or who just want to see justice done, will soon have the opportunity to do something about it. The hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson), who speaks with great knowledge on these matters, made a similar point.
	If removing dividend tax credit was such a great idea, why did the Chancellor fight for those two long years to resist the freedom of information request from  The Times? Why did we also hear from the former Chancellor, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), that he had had this very idea put to him by officials and had decided not to do it? It is incredible that when questioned in this House by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Miss Kirkbride), the Chancellor said, with effortless effrontery:
	"I support the release of the papers."—[ Official Report, 17 April 2007; Vol. 459, c. 183.]
	Presumably it was some other Chancellor who had fought so hard to keep them secret. It was a bit like the prisoner on his climb up to the gallows declaring his enthusiastic support for the death penalty.
	Ministers should hang their heads in shame at their persistent refusal to draw a line under this scandal and help to give long-term pensions reform a fresh start. The new Secretary of State has a clean slate. He can choose to look at this matter again; in some ways, he suggested that he would. If the former Chancellor, now the Prime Minister, wants to have a honeymoon with 100 days of spectacularly popular announcements, this would be a very good start. If not, it is difficult to disagree with the conclusion of  The Daily Telegraph when it said that on this issue the new Prime Minister
	"is not fit to lead, not fit to govern and not fit to be trusted."

Mike O'Brien: Let me begin by welcoming the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) to his new position. I wish the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Mr. Waterson) well in the reshuffle that appears to be under way; we understand these matters ourselves. I also wish well the hon. Member for Yeovil (Mr. Laws), who gave us his valedictory speech. It was a thoughtful speech, and I shall certainly bear in mind many of the points that he made in his interesting reflections on matters that he has raised while he has been a Liberal Democrat spokesperson on pensions.
	Having listened to the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell make his opening speech as a Front-Bench spokesperson on pensions, it looks as though there is a greater degree of difference between us than that which unites us. In fact, his speech was a lot of partisan knockabout. The reality is that we agree on many of the things that we need to agree on as regards the future of pensions. It is right that we should, because, over time—over decades—Governments might change their colour, and hence a consensus on long-term pension policy is a crucial obligation on all political parties. That consensus has been built up, across a range of issues, around the Turner report.
	I welcome the extent of the agreement that exists, certainly between the two main parties. I also welcome the comments by the hon. Member for Yeovil about wanting the consensus to be built up. I hope that that view is shared by his colleague, the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Danny Alexander), whom I welcome to his Front-Bench position. I hope that he, too, will feel that he can participate in building that long-term consensus. As we continue to do that, I look forward, in the coming weeks and months, to meeting the various stakeholder groups, and indeed the Opposition parties.
	However, there are disagreements between us and it is right that the debate should reflect on and deal with them. First, let me comment on some of the points that were made during the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Alan Simpson) was right to claim, in a challenging and powerful speech, that the tax changes in 1997 were about strengthening investment. He raised a range of issues about the financial assistance scheme and the number of people who have been assisted by it so far. We are anxious to bring more people into the scheme and ascertain whether we can get more people assisted by it.
	We need information from some of the trustees of schemes to ensure that we have sufficient detail to start making payments. That has been a problem, but we have now simplified some of the information requests that are made to the schemes to ensure that compliance is easier. Through officials in the Department, we have been trying to meet representatives of the schemes to ascertain whether we can get them to participate more fully so that we can achieve precisely what my hon. Friend wants: more people able to be helped by the FAS.
	My hon. Friend raised a couple of other issues, which I shall tackle briefly. He said that the FAS benefits did not include revaluation, indexation or survivor benefits. However, they protect pensions against inflation until the age of 65. The survivor benefits are paid at 50 per cent. of FAS entitlement. Given that FAS is a sort of top-up, some of the non-core benefits may therefore be included in the annuity that the pension scheme pays.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) made an eloquent speech, in which he raised thoughtful points. I look forward to working with him to tackle some of them.
	I hope that we can engage with some of the points raised by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, West (Sir John Butterfill) in due course.
	My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt) referred especially to Federal Mogul and the Turner and Newall pension fund. I declare an interest in that I, too, have constituents who are directly affected by that matter—they work in Coventry. I look forward to meeting him to discuss those issues. I pay tribute to his work in leading the fight for the Turner and Newall pension fund members to ensure that they get a better deal.
	The Opposition's original title for the debate was "Crisis in Pensions". The Pensions Commission stated in its executive report:
	"On average, current pensioners are as well provided relative to average earnings as any previous generation, and many will continue to be well provided over the next 15 years. There is therefore no general and immediate crisis."
	When we came to office, our first priority was to tackle pensioner poverty. Nearly one third of pensioners were living in relative poverty. Compared with the policies that we inherited in 1997, we now spend more than £11 billion extra on pensioners. Around half of that goes to the poorest third of pensioners. Consequently, more than 1 million pensioners have been lifted out of relative poverty for the first time in a generation. Pensioners are no more likely to be poor than any other group.
	Our second challenge was to improve the security of private pensions. That included dealing with the pensions mis-selling scandal and the impact of the falling stock market on occupational pension schemes. We introduced the Pension Protection Fund, which offers security to more than 12 million members of occupational schemes and provides compensation if their employers become insolvent.
	The pensions regulator helps protect members' benefits and promote the good administration of workplace schemes. The significantly expanded FAS will help to some extent those who have lost their workplace pensions before the PPF was established.
	Let me deal with some of the concerns about the FAS. The scheme provides critical support for those who have lost their pensions. As a result of the Budget announcement, the newly expanded scheme will support all the 125,000 people whose occupational pension schemes were affected by employer insolvency before the PPF was created.
	As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State explained in his opening speech, we would like to go further if funding can be found from other sources. We invite contributions to the current review for viable and sustainable solutions. As hon. Members know, the review will examine whether the alternative treatment of the residual funds in affected schemes could compliment the £8 billion that the Government have committed, supplementing the increased support.
	We look forward to the results of that review and we will all return to the Chamber later this month to debate the Pensions Bill. I hope that we will all agree that sustainable, affordable, effective and deliverable solutions provide the only realistic and responsible way to proceed.
	We have been asked why we will not support the lifeboat fund or the lifeboat proposals that came from the other place. Let me be clear that the Government want to get the right money to people who have lost their pensions. We have already committed £8 billion of taxpayers' money to the financial assistance scheme and we have set up a review led and advised by experts. Putting the FAS on a par with the benefits offered by the PPF is simply unaffordable. Such a policy would effectively increase costs by a third. We do not believe that the taxpayer should be expected to provide high levels of compensation for schemes run by private employers. It would not be right to put FAS recipients in the same position through taxpayers' money as those whose schemes contribute to the PPF by way of a levy. We are not averse to the idea of making more money available if it is feasible, but at this stage, we do not know what assets, if any, are available. It seems sensible to find that out before putting any proposals forward.
	There are clear objections to the proposals coming from the other place. First, the lifeboat proposals depart from the principle that evidence should guide policy. We need evidence of what is available and how it can be accessed before we start putting legislation in place that obliges us to access funds. The noble Lord Turnbull described the proposal in the other place as rather like introducing a dangerous dogs Act without finding out where the dangerous dogs are.
	Secondly, it is simplistic merely to claim that unclaimed pension assets without clear ownership are some sort of windfall gain to insurance companies. We need to think carefully about the implications of that, but the proposals from the other place do not deal with that at all.
	The third objection is, of course, equity. The lifeboat will take from existing policyholders a long-term part of their gain. The Association of British Insurers described it as robbing Peter to pay Paul. As Lord Turnbull said, it might be that some of the Pauls are better off than the Peters. Once again, the issue needs to be looked into with a great deal more care than has been demonstrated by the Conservatives—and, indeed, the Liberal Democrats—in the other place.
	The lifeboat proposals require the state to take away somebody else's property. In other instances, we call that taxation. The noble Lord Turnbull suggested that the Conservatives, after complaining loudly about stealth taxes and pension grabs, now seem to be supporting a proposal that exposes them to exactly the same charge—of imposing a Tory stealth tax. They need to be much more careful about what they are supporting.

Question accordingly agreed to.
	madam deputy speaker  declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to.
	 Resolved,
	That this House welcomes the policies of this Government to tackle pensioner poverty which have lifted two million pensioners out of absolute poverty and one million out of relative poverty, the action to tackle the legacy of pensions mis-selling, support occupational pensions through a Pension Protection Fund set up for the first time and a new Pensions Regulator, further support for 125,000 people through the Financial Assistance Scheme whose occupational pensions were affected by employer insolvency, set out the long-term framework for pensions through the new Pensions Bill, including re-linking the basic State Pension to average earnings, introduce a new scheme of low cost personal accounts and stakeholder pensions of which over three million have been created, remove the dividend tax credit, make reductions in corporation tax which have contributed to the 50 per cent. rise in business investment, broke public sector pension agreements which ensure a fair deal for today's and tomorrow's public sector workers and introduce free television licences and the Pension Credit to provide an additional framework of support for today's pensioners.'.

Madam Deputy Speaker: The hon. Gentleman has raised what he considers to be a put of order, but it is not a point of order for the Chair. The motion has just not been moved.

Bob Spink: Following Castle Point veterans day on Friday, which was a tremendous success and unprecedented with more than 500 people attending, I am honoured to present a petition on behalf of tomorrow's veterans. It calls on the Government to show that they recognise and care about the difficulties that our servicemen and women face right now. They are fighting and some are dying for the security of this country and the wider world; they are fighting people who would destroy our way of life. Like the Castle Point veterans, they are, as Tony Blair put it last week, the "bravest and the best".
	The petition states:
	The Petition of David Cain, Philip Redl and others declares that the cost of sending parcels and letters to members of HM Armed Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan is inequitable in relation to the nature of their work and the commitment they have made to serve their country.
	Therefore, your Petitioners request that the House of Commons urges the Government to adopt a policy of free postage to members of HM Armed Forces from family and friends in the UK in recognition of the contribution made by these brave men and women.
	And the Petitioners remain, etc.
	 To lie upon the Table.

David Mundell: I am pleased to have secured the opportunity to mark in the House the 250th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Telford. I see this Adjournment debate as a contribution to the celebration of the life and legacy of an outstanding man, not just of his time but as one whose work has shaped his profession to this day and many of whose engineering feats are still in use centuries later.
	There is absolutely no doubt that Scotland would not be the place it is today without Thomas Telford. His work literally opened up the highlands with more than 900 miles of new roads, hundreds of bridges, ferry landing piers and dozens of churches. Indeed, the work enabled the transportation of goods and people across the whole of Scotland, facilitating many aspects of the industrial revolution.
	Today, we take it for granted that motorways, bridges and canals exist. We do not stop to consider that planning these transport networks and many aspects of the methodology of construction were visualised hundreds of years before. Telford's Glasgow-to-Carlisle road, of which many parts remain, runs through my constituency and was the equivalent of the modern M74 motorway which is only now being completed between Gretna and Carlisle.
	Although this debate is taking place hundreds of miles from Telford's birthplace at Glendinning at Westerkirk in the Dumfriesshire part of my constituency, it is taking place only a few hundred yards from his final resting place in Westminster Abbey—a mark of the esteem in which he is held and an honour bestowed on only one other civil engineer: Robert Stephenson, who pioneered the railways. Telford stamped his presence on civil engineering and is more than worth the set of stamps that the Royal Mail is producing this year. His legacy to his profession was in the standards he set for a reliable system of estimates, contracts, specifications and tenders, which are as relevant today as they were in the 1800s.
	In our time, when social mobility is the subject of much debate, Thomas Telford's achievement was that he rose from being the son of a shepherd on a remote Dumfriesshire hillside to being the most lauded and esteemed civil engineer in the empire. His poet friend Robert Southey termed him the "Colossus of Roads". That is just one reason why I would like to see the Government in Westminster and the Scottish Government in Edinburgh do more to promote recognition of the achievements of Telford and people of his ilk, who did so much to shape the modern world in the final centuries of the last millennium.
	Ahead of the debate, I had the opportunity to speak to Scotland's new Culture Minister, Linda Fabiani MSP, and was encouraged by her acceptance that Scotland could do better in promoting the life and legacy of such people as Telford, who leave a permanent footprint on our way of life and remain a lasting influence over Scotland, the United Kingdom and the rest of the world. I want to make the same plea to the Minister on a United Kingdom basis because, with his works in Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland, Telford was truly a great Briton.
	To understand the motivations of such a man, we need to accept and appreciate where he came from. Telford was born on 9 August 1757. His father was a herdsman on the sheep farm of Glendinning at Westerkirk. It was and remains a remote and isolated area. It is farmed today by Lorraine Luesher, who works hard to keep the tradition of hill farming alive in Eskdale and who has produced a booklet on the Telford legacy. His father died weeks after his birth and so his mother Janet brought up Thomas. The close-knit local community supported the boy, who was known as "laughing Tam" for his good nature. As a youngster, he attended Westerkirk school and much of his early life was spent working as a shepherd on neighbouring farms, and with his widowed mother.
	After leaving school, Telford looked for work that offered decent prospects. His family were able to get him placed as an apprentice mason. His first master treated him very cruelly and Telford ran away, but his cousin Thomas Jackson found him work with Andrew Thomson, a Langholm mason. The Duke of Buccleuch was improving his estate at that time and Telford was kept busy, becoming a journeyman mason earning 18d a day. As he himself said,
	"I ever congratulate myself upon the circumstances which compelled me to begin by working with my own hands, and thus to acquire early experience of the habits and feelings of workmen".
	During this time, Telford met Miss Pasley, whose books he was able to borrow. He became a voracious reader. He described his studies in the following way:
	"I read, and read, and glowred; then read and read again."
	At the age of 23, Telford considered himself to be the master of his art and went to Edinburgh. Although he lived much of his adult life away from his place of birth, he always thought fondly of it, writing in his autobiography:
	"I still recollect with pride and pleasure my native parish of Westerkirk."
	In Edinburgh, he studied drawing and its application to architecture. In 1782, Telford travelled south to find work in London, writing that he
	"judged it advisable (like many of my countrymen) to proceed southward, where industry might find more employment, and be better rewarded."
	He was lucky to obtain work at Somerset House, an enormous construction project at the time. He served as Shropshire's first surveyor of public works in 1787, and so began a career that included the building of roads, bridges, churches, harbours and canals, many of which are still in use today.

David Wright: I congratulate the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on an outstanding speech celebrating Thomas Telford. He has done the House and me a service by securing the Adjournment debate this evening. It would be remiss of me, being the Member of Parliament whose constituency is named after Thomas Telford, if I did not make a few remarks tonight.
	I have always said that I have lived in the town of Telford all my life. That is not quite true. I was born 40 years ago, and Telford new town was not designated until 29 September 1968, but I can say that I have lived in parts of what is now Telford for all my life. We as a community in the town celebrate this year the birth of Thomas Telford, the man who gave his name to our town. Before that, the area was called Dawley new town and it was expanded significantly in the late 1960s when there was a need for additional housing for people moving out of the west midlands conurbation. The town was built on the east Shropshire coalfield. It is a combination of older communities like Dawley, Madeley, Wellington and Oakengates that had an engineering and mining history. Telford would have been proud that an area with that mining and industrial heritage and history was named after him.
	There is sometimes confusion in Telford because people think that Thomas Telford designed the Iron Bridge, which of course is not true. The number of people who have said to me that Thomas Telford designed the Iron Bridge is incredible. The Iron Bridge was designed by Abraham Darby III, but it would have been difficult to call the town Darby when there already was a town called Derby, so it was a wise decision to call the town Telford when it was expanded in 1968. We are proud to share the connection with the hon. Gentleman's constituency. As I am holidaying in Scotland over the summer, I hope that I may be able to pay a visit to his constituency and his community to visit the site where Thomas Telford was born. I am looking forward to that very much.
	I want to pay tribute also to Telford and Wrekin council for the programme of events that it has put together, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, over this year. There are some superb events involving schools and focusing on education. We can be proud of the connection that we are making with education. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the Institution of Civil Engineers, which seems to be doing a great job. Its website contains a whole section on Thomas Telford, showing a timeline and focusing on his achievements. They are significant, and we would not have the nation that we have today without Telford. He was a great Briton. The point made earlier by the hon. Gentleman about the importance of the union is very much solidified by the work that Telford did during his lifetime, and the way in which that has lasted and provided a service to the public through the generations in terms of his engineering skills.
	Telford and Wrekin council had a garden celebrating Telford at the Chelsea flower show, which was fantastic. I am not a great gardener, but my wife is, and we paid a visit to the garden, which I am pleased to report won a silver medal. The council hopes to do a further garden at Chelsea next year, because that will be the 40th anniversary of the designation of Telford new town in September 1968. Therefore, I should like the Government to think about whether they can roll the celebration of Telford's 250th anniversary through to a celebration of 40 years of what perhaps records him most in this country, and that is the town of Telford.
	I again thank the hon. Gentleman for securing this important debate and I look forward to my words joining his in his local library.

Margaret Hodge: As this is my first occasion at the Dispatch Box since my appointment as Minister with responsibility for culture, I should like to take this opportunity to say how delighted I am to take on such a stimulating and varied brief, covering a huge range of activities in which this country is a world leader.
	I pay tribute to two of my predecessors whose portfolios mine now covers. One is my hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr. Lammy), with whom I look forward to working in his new capacity, and the other is my right hon. Friend the Member for St. Helens, South (Mr. Woodward), whom I am sure the House will want to congratulate on his new appointment as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and wish him well.
	I congratulate the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on a comprehensive, clear and fulsome tribute to Thomas Telford. Scotland has an unparalleled record in producing civil engineers of the finest calibre, and Thomas Telford was clearly one of the most eminent of them all, which is signified, as the hon. Gentleman said, by his burial in Westminster abbey.
	It is right that the hon. Gentleman and his constituents, and those communities in Scotland and in England whose heritage has been enhanced by the work of Thomas Telford, should seek to commemorate the 250th anniversary of his birth in an appropriate manner. I also acknowledge and have seen the events and activities being co-ordinated across the country by the Institution of Civil Engineers. In my previous ministerial role as Minister with responsibility for industry, I had much interaction with that institution. It is an excellent organisation that does an enormous amount of work in promoting engineering, and particularly in training, as the hon. Gentleman said.
	I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Telford (David Wright) on his contribution to tonight's Adjournment debate. I have had the privilege of visiting Telford on a number of occasions and seeing the excellent work that has been carried out in a range of ministerial portfolios, and how well the new town has settled down to become established. It excels in many areas, so I am happy to take away and consider my hon. Friend's proposition, although he will recognise that I have very little direct authority. We work through non-departmental public bodies in most of the work that we do.
	The 250th anniversary to mark the birth of Thomas Telford is a crucial event and all the events surrounding it are managed by those for whom the life of Thomas Telford had particular resonance. It is a little difficult for the Government to intervene directly, much as the hon. Gentleman would like me to, in activities surrounding the celebration of the life of one individual. The proper role for the Government is to support and invest in our heritage for the benefit of the public and for future generations. Our industrial heritage reflects the story of Britain and the world over the past 200 years. It is a source of education, inspiration and enjoyment to families and communities across the country, and to tourists from across the world.
	This year alone, the Government will invest more than £500 million in the museums and heritage sector. It is right that expert bodies such as English Heritage and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council make the most effective use of taxpayers' money. As the number of deserving causes will always exceed the funds available, they are best placed to determine the priority projects for support. I am delighted that among the museums funded by the MLA's "Renaissance in the Regions" programme, Ironbridge Gorge museum is hosting an exhibition exploring the achievements of Thomas Telford.
	Exchequer funding is, of course, complemented by money from the national lottery, and I commend the work of the Heritage Lottery Fund in awarding almost £4 billion to projects that have helped to open up our heritage for everyone to enjoy. That work is further enhanced by the tremendous contribution of a broad range of private, charitable and corporate donors, whose support deserves public recognition.
	Last week, we saw just how vital public and private partnerships are to preservation of the nation's heritage. I was delighted that a unique coalition of partners came together to secure Dumfries house and its contents for the nation, and I am sure that the hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale is fully aware of that. Together, they have been able to raise £45 million to ensure that the house and its contents will be open to the public for the first time. All those involved deserve recognition, and I was delighted that in addition to the substantial donations from His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales charitable foundation, the Monument Trust and the Art Fund, £12 million of public money was invested through the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Scottish Executive. Although Dumfries house lies just outside the hon. Gentleman's constituency, I am sure that he will join me in thanking all those involved in this remarkable demonstration of the value that we place on our heritage in Britain.
	We are exceptionally fortunate in this country in having had eminent citizens in all walks of life and all fields of human endeavour. If we sought to mark every anniversary, we would undoubtedly be accused of being overly prescriptive. For example, 1757 also saw the birth of William Blake, who is also commemorated in Westminster abbey. So while we have no specific plans to mark the anniversary of Telford's birth, nor indeed that of William Blake, I wish all those marking the occasion every success in their activities, and I join the hon. Gentleman and my hon. Friend in paying tribute to the life and works of Thomas Telford.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at t wo  minutes  to  Eleven o'clock.